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.