Month: March 2024

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Within Whitman’s Song of Myself, he utilizes the most prominent figurative language strategy of repetition. This is not the only figurative device that he utilizes, but it is one of the most notable ones.

He uses repetition as a way of emphasizing the connections between all of these living things as well as himself. As he reveals throughout, he feels a deeper connection to these things and people. Thus, by utilizing repetition, he is able to emphasize just how connected he feels every element is.
For instance, in Song of Myself #15, he repeats the phrase “The [noun]”, which becomes a list of things that are weaved into Whitman’s “Song of [himself]”

“The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, / The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready, / The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, […] And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.” (Pg. 1321 – 1323, #15)

The phrases that he uses at the ending of this section of Whitman’s Song of Myself shows off that the speaker feels that all of these things are connected both to each other and to the speaker themselves. Without the last three lines, it would seem more like a list and unrelated to each other. However, with the inclusion of these last three lines, it becomes a list of things and people that are all interconnected and tied to the speaker. They go from simply people going about their days to this web of people and how their souls are all connected through one person.

Then, he also utilizes a large portion of imagery in order to convey what he is seeing himself. He describes, again in #15 but also in #33 the people that he sees.

“The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles / its wild ascending lisp, … The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case, / (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s / bed-room;)” (Pg. 1321, #15)

“Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees, / Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those / drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, / Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooch or Altamahaw, / Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons / around them, / In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their / day’s sport,” (Pg. 1323, #15)`

“I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone borken, / Tumbling walls buried me in their debris, / Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades, / I heard the distant click of their picks and shovls, / They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth. / I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake, / Painless after all I lie exhauusted but not so unhappy, / White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of / their fire-caps, / The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.” (pg. 1340, #33)

This shows off the beautiful use of imagery whilst also conveying that the speaker / Whitman view themselves as being one in the same as the observed, viewing their experiences in a light that reflects and is a part of their own. It reflects the connectedness of these images and situations, in a way that enhances the overall argument that the speaker is akin to Jesus (in the Christian sense of being the Messiah and all) and feels, experiences, and sees the vast experiences of all humans, becoming them in turn.

With both the repetition and imagery, he ensures that he conveys the idea that he is akin to Jesus, again in the Christian sense, connected to all things and being all things whilst also being himself.
Without doing this, he would not have had such a strong impact on the reader.

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I will be the first to say poetry is an area I struggle in, and I almost always find myself stressing over uncovering the meanings of poems. That being said, there are two lines that I feel best represent the poem as a whole.

The first section is lines 36 and 37 “you shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.” the description of filtering things from yourself caught me off guard. I couldn’t tell if he intended it as a person should also separate themselves from what they are seeing/experiencing and be objective, or (probably more likely) if they should filter these things through themself to create a subjective experience. Poetry tends to favor a subjective approach to the world, so I’m more inclined to go with the latter. If it is intentionally vague and not just my own failure to understand, I think its interesting that he sets it up as the “origin of all poems” (lines 33-34). It also potentially supports the emphasis of the individual in the process of creating a poem. the ideas of unity and the individual are heavily present throughout the poem.

The second line I found interesting is in the final stanza of section 15, “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself” (Lines 327-329). These lines stuck out to be as capable of encapsulating a lot of the message of the poem. The idea that he weaves this representation of himself not just from the things he experiences, but of the experiences of others he might interact with or see or never know exist. even though they are not necessarily his experiences, they make up the human experience which unites all humans together.

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Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” evidently influenced by the sentiments expressed by Emerson, echo religious ideologies. As has been noted by others, he spends much time reflecting on nature and its demonstration of the “oneness” of beings, as well as suggests that “there is really no death.” Section 24 contains one aspect of his various attempts to convey to his reader a sense of interconnectedness and unity in seemingly individual experiences. He says: “Whoever degrades another degrades me; And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.” I am certainly swayed here by my history in Catholic school, but this immediately struck me as similar to the Christian teaching that if you hurt others, you hurt Jesus. This line of thinking feels supported a few lines later: “Voices of the interminable generations of slaves…of prostitutes…of deform’d persons…of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs…” etc. Jesus is portrayed as having stood up for outcasts in society, such as the “prostitute” and the “diseas’d” leper; in a similar way, here, Whitman seems to present himself as the spokesperson or even savior for those who suffer at the hands of a corrupt society. 

This is amplified by the overall tone of “Song of Myself” that seems to place the narrator — presumably Whitman himself — as “enlightened” or as having access to some deep truth or esoteric meaning of life that allows him to see beyond superficial, worldly perspectives. In fact, Whitman suggests that his perceived extreme empathetic capacity allows him to experience the suffering of other people. This is most prevalent in section 33: “I am the hounded slave.” This is just one – and perhaps the most striking – example of Whitman’s alleged sensitivity to others, accompanied also by the “fireman” and the “mother, condemn’d for a witch.” Of course, this is a poem, and Whitman may have intended for his reader to interpret these lines hyperbolically. However, he expands upon these claims with strong, specific language. Does he really mean to evoke a Jesus-like persona, “taking on” the suffering and sins of others? Most likely not. I assume, dangerously, that he is just trying to send a general message as to the interconnectedness of humankind. However, regardless of his intentions, Whitman’s claim to understanding the plight of enslaved people is not only bold, but quite disturbing, given the fact that slavery was still in operation at the time of this poem’s composition and that Whitman was a white, male intellectual. I am not positive as to his specific opinions on slavery, but I don’t think any ideology can justify this insensitive claim to “sensitivity.” 

That is, unless Whitman actually believes himself to be the second coming. Or if he is being literal here and claiming to have the ability to physically drift between the consciousnesses of others. These would be entirely separate issues.

 

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The 33rd section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is the longest of the entire collection and, perhaps due to its verbosity, spans perhaps the largest range of emotion. He catalogues his vision of the world from the viewpoint of a hot air balloon, capable of accessing freedom from both gravity and the smaller perspective of someone more grounded. He is “a free companion” (1339) who never stays in one place for too long, forever tugged along by wanderlust and governed by his flights of poetic fancy. This far-off position allows him to practice a grand form of empathy, becoming each beast or person he sees, inhabiting the lives of those he witnesses and representing them through his own voice. He proclaims that he swallows all of it and “like[s] it well” to the extent that “it becomes [his]” (1339).

There is, of course, an inevitable price. That empathy and becoming extends not only to the birds and the bridegrooms, but to the martyrs and hounded slaves and breast-broken firemen, as “agonies are one of [his] changes of garments” (1340). To become a part of everything, through empathy and the written word, is to experience the sorrows as much as the pleasures. Whitman represents himself as someone who is able to occupy the role of anyone and “take part…see and hear the whole” (1340), stepping beyond any dispassionate position as a narrator or observer and instead becoming an active player in the narrative. The poet is as much a part of the world he writes as he is the creator of it. To watch, to describe, is to participate.

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When I was first introduced to literary analysis of poems in high school, one of the first things that I was taught was to examine the form. Meaning was frequently extracted from meter, rhyme scheme, punctuation, etc. And so I sat down to read “Song of Myself” in the same way.

 However, try as I might, I wasn’t able to find many of the formal elements I would consider to be characteristic of poetry. Repetition certainly abounds, such as in Section 15, where almost every line begins with “the,” but what I found most interesting was the rhythm that Whitman creates within his free-verse poetry without the crutch of a formal structure or rhyme scheme. In Section Four he writes “The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,\ My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,…” (69-70). What jumped out at me was the sound that “dates,” “discoveries,” “dinner,” and “dress” make. The hard consonant at the beginning adds emphasis, which then gives the lines a distinct beat. I find this unique, free-style rhythm that Whitman creates to be quite interesting, and I would love to hear him read it out loud. I found a recording of him reading four lines from “America,” but to my knowledge there is no recording of him reading “Song of Myself.”

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As I was reading Song of Myself, I could not decide whether the speaker’s voice is more intimately dreamy-like, or if the voice is one full of hubris and even vanity to a certain degree. The voice in my head was in constant shifts between different tones. Sometimes it would be a romantic voice like that of Romeo in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film Romeo and Juliet. For example:

“I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.”

 

(Song of Myself, Section 5)

Other times, and perhaps more frequently so, I would hear the prideful, epic  voice of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey…

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

 

(Song of Myself, Section 24)

Although the lines above suggest that he’s just a human being, no better than others, I think deep down he (and the reader) may share a feeling that this is not how he truly thinks of himself. Throughout Song of Myself, I had a feeling that he was writing to impress and to show how great he is, being a poet and being the deep observer that Emerson advocated everyone should be. He wanted to be the example, which makes this poem not only artful as poems are but also prideful in nature, to believe that he could see associations between what there is and more abstract things, more than many others could.

Maybe we’re not supposed to pick a singular voice. Maybe we can read it in our mind in both Romeo’s and Odysseus’ voices, because the poem goes through many emotions. A deep and almost Epicurean-like simplicity of love for the outer world and its relation to the soul, along with a sense of gratitude and pride in being able to play the language like an instrument to express that love — these things are for us to take delight in.

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I really enjoyed reading some passages from Walk Whitman’s, “Song of Myself.” One thing I noticed while I was reading this, was the sense of calm that came over me. This could be because it is poetry and makes me feel a different way when reading it. However, I think a lot of it has to do with the truth that Whitman talks about.

My favorite sections that we read were the sections that were simply just lists. #15 and #33 especially. One was a list of different types of people and another was a list of animals and things in nature. I was astonished by how real Whitman made these individual people or animals seem. He gave a voice to those who might not normally be in literature and I appreciate that. Clearly, Whitman makes it clear that it is important to notice those things that surround you. Yes, you are your own person, but you are also who you are because of those around you. You are made up of your interactions with others and how you move throughout the world.

I appreciate Whitman’s ability to notice all the little intricacies of life. He reminds us that we can be wonderful and fulfill ourselves. However, unlike Emerson thinks, we all rely on each other to be our best selves as well. The only way to better understand ourselves is to better understand the world around us and how we fit into that. This has inspired me to simply try to notice more. I’m sure that we pass by so many things in our daily lives that are important, but we ignore. Whitman encourages us to stop and take all of these things in.

Loading Likes... While I loved all of the poems in this collection, poem #6 stuck out to me the most because of its imagery and the ending. I felt the message of the poem was very similar to Buddhist ideologies, both the concept that all beings are connected and that death is a central part of the cycle of life. Whitman took a blade of grass, which is something so small and easily overlooked, and brought it to life with the meaning it holds. He saw the way it connects to us all, “growing among black folks as among white” (1316, line 107) and transpiring from young men and mother’s laps, because he saw how it shares life with us like any other living being in nature. He connects each young and old man, or mother’s offspring, with a blade of grass that dies and grows again. In this metaphor, he concludes with his thoughts about death that echo Buddhist ideology like a mirror, saying, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life” (1317, lines 126-7). This poem felt so grounded in experience to me and also made me think back to Emerson’s “Nature” where he implores us to look into nature to find the truth about humanity. In a sense, I think that is exactly what Whitman has done here, by sitting with grass and finding meaning in it.

Loading Likes... When reading the poetry of Whiteman, I couldn’t help, but observe his focus on the portrayal of the everyday mundane. He wrote of the natural world and of average people whom actually occupy it, but despite the content’s ordinariness his work created a beautiful image in “Song to Myself.” It was an image that placed Whitman among nature and connected him to the world around him without the restriction of society’s warriors from natural order. He shows every living thing to be equal no matter their profession by placing them in the same world that applies the same rules to each of them.

In section 15, Whitman writes,
“The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of the foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready…”

This section of his work equalizes the mentioned people. It compares a pilot and a contralto, a carpenter and a mate on a whale boat. Each individual is simply doing what they do and there is no judgment, just acute observation of their livelihoods by Whitman.

I found this simplistic view of the world and the people in it as just beings reminiscent of the philosophies of Emerson who saw man’s pursuits to align with nature. He believed that as long as man had the world god gave them that there should be no reason to be unhappy for they have fields to grow food in and work to do that was a gift from God. Whiteman is writing of everyday life as it’s a beautiful thing, a part of the song in him, a part of what makes him him. His livelihood can be expressed in ordinary words because his poetry reacts to Whiteman’s call for a return to nature and embraces the ordinary over the extravagance of previous western ideals.

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In class we talked about how Whitman looked up to Emerson, and it was interesting to observe how this can be seen throughout his poem, “Song of Myself.”

From the very beginning, it is clear that Whitman and Emerson had very similar ideals. They both cry out against looking back and relying on historical perspectives, calling for a larger emphasis on experiencing things for yourself. In lines 34-37, Whitman writes “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books.” He beseeches the reader to observe and interpret things for themselves, exactly like Emerson does in the first paragraph of “Nature”, when he writes “why should we grope among the dry bones of the past […] The sun shines to-day also.”

Both writers also express their belief in the divinity of the individual. Whitman declares “I know the hand of God is the promise of my own, // And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,” while Emerson writes about being “a particle of God” in “The Divinity School Address.” They both seem to consider themselves as a deity in some way.

An interesting contradiction between the two is that Whitman is known for his poetry while Emerson is not. Considering all that Emerson wrote glorifying poets, its not surprising that Whitman was a poet, but Emerson himself was not known for his poems, but rather his lectures. Reading his poem “The Adirondacs”, I feel that it is apparent that poetry was not Emerson’s strong suit. He has none of Whitman’s confidence or rhythm. I can’t help but wonder about how Emerson felt about this young follower whose poetic abilities far outpaced his own.