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.