Whitman's Song of Myself

The purpose of this research is to provide an analysis of a short, significant part of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," relating that part to the whole poem itself.

The part of "Song of Myself" to be analyzed thus is:

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself (Whitman 69).

These seven lines are taken from the 46th "paragraph" of Whitman's poem. The first five lines summarize his vision of his own role as a poet; the last two lines explain Whitman's idea of the role that each individual reader must play in the journey through both life and the poem itself. The points made in these lines reflect the heart of the message carried by the entire poem -that the poet and the reader are travelling companions rather than teacher-and-student. Their travels include local and continental and cosmic excursions; and that each individual alone has the map and the legs that will carry him or her through that journey, over that road. These declarations apply as much to Whitman's entire collection of poetry, but here we will be singly concerned with the relationship of the above-quoted seven lines and the poem from which they are taken -Whitman's "Song of Myself."

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anionship of poet and reader. Regarding the rest of "Song of Myself", we find many additional instances of reference to the body, to physical contact between the poet and the reader, and to an emphasis on the relationships between humanity and the physical world and the celebrative nature of that set of relationships. Of his celebrative, ecstatic sense of his own body, Whitman writes: If I worship one thing more than another it shall Be the spread of my own body, or any part of it . . . (Whitman 44). First and foremost Whitman is intent with his senses, which he considers to be the essential anchors which keeps him from floating free from his home on earth. His body he sees as the intersection through which the world passes, and without it neither he nor the world could be made heads or tails of. But celebration of his own body in isolation is not what Whitman is after. Rather his ecstasy is founded on the physical relationship with other human beings, and with the physical, sensory, sensual things of the earth. For instance, Whitman writes most passionately of his vision of union an contact with others in the physical realm: I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles .

Category: Literature - W