About the poem
The date in the AQA Anthology is mistaken - this poem (according to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume 16: Early National Literature) was first published in The American in 1880 and reprinted in Harper's Monthly in 1881. By this time, Whitman was settled in New Jersey, where Barnegat lies on the coast in what is today called Ocean County. The title is also "corrected" to the standard UK form - Whitman writes "Patroling" with one "l".
This poem comes from a section of Leaves of Grass called Sea Drift - containing poems, inspired by the sea, which explore the mysteries of life and death. It contains two of the most famous of all Whitman's lyrics - Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life. Barnegat is on the Atlantic Coast of south New Jersey (between Atlantic City and Jersey City). The wild sea that Whitman describes now draws sailing enthusiasts to Ocean County. Barnegat is on the coast - some way inland lies Camden, where Whitman lived from 1873 until his death. By a curious coincidence, since 1996, Barnegat Bay has been protected as one of the USA's estuaries of national importance - having been nominated for this by a state governor called Whitman.
The poem in detail
We are not told who is "patroling" but assume that it is the poet, late at night. The poem is almost a list of details, each line ending with a verb. Mostly these suggest strong physical action or vivid details. It is not clear whether the "dim, weird forms" are natural features, ships or people - but there is a clear sense of nature as massively powerful, threatening man's precarious existence.
Whitman suggests the idea of evil spirits by describing the wind as "shouts of demoniac laughter" and seeing "waves, air, midnight" as a savage "trinity" (three-in-one) - an image that appears twice. His readers would compare this to the Holy Trinity of Father (God), Son (Jesus) and Holy Ghost (Spirit).
He shows the reader how the person "patroling" cannot be sure what is happening out at sea - by the final reference to "dim, weird forms" and earlier in the questions about "that in the distance". Is it "a wreck" and "is the red signal flaring"?
The poet's method
Nearly all of the poems in Leaves of Grass are written in free verse - that is, without formal patterns of rhyme or metre. Sometimes this gives us little more than chopped prose - prose broken into lines. This poem has a more clear structure - like Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse, and the later poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lines fall into two halves, each containing two stressed syllables.
The other formal feature is more obvious - each line finishes with a verb ending in "-ing". This is the form called the present participle. This means that the whole poem, set out as a single sentence, does not at any point have a main finite verb.
(Silly people might say this makes it "ungrammatical" or that Whitman uses "bad" grammar. And you would not want to risk writing like this in an exam, unless you could convince the examiners that you had a good reason for doing it. The first chapter of Dickens' Great Expectations also contains a "sentence" with no main verb. These are examples of artistic licence - if people think you know what you are doing, you can break the rules in some kinds of writing activity.)
Whitman uses effects of sound - particularly
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alliteration (repeating the same initial consonant), and
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onomatopoeia (using words that sound like what they mean).
He combines both of these effects with repeated use of the sibilant "s" sound - which may resemble the sound of the surf breaking and falling back. (You don't need to know these technical names but you should be able to find examples of them in use and explain how they work in the poem - you should do this before writing or speaking about the poems for assessed work or an exam.)
Among the other technical effects Whitman uses are:
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Anthropomorphism or animism - Whitman writes about natural things as if they are features of a person or intelligent creature - such as "muttering" and "laughter". He also writes as if the natural world has attitudes or feelings, with qualifiers (adjectives and adverbs) like "wild", "fitfully", "fierce", "watchful", "tireless" and "never remitting". (It is not clear whether the "struggling" and "watching" at the end of the poem are also being done by natural things or by real people.)
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Images - all of the images are of things that are really (or "literally") there to be seen. But they may also represent other things. Can you find any vivid or memorable images?
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Repetition - Whitman writes many things twice, sometimes a whole phrase ("milk-white combs careering", "slush and sand"), sometimes a single word ("midnight"), and sometimes a different form of the same root word ("beachy" and "beach").
