gh, and perhaps out of the poem and the world presented in the poem. "You must travel it for yourself," Whitman says, and he might have added, reflecting the first line of the poem, "You must celebrate yourself, and you must sing yourself; not I, not any one else can celebrate so sing yourself for you."
Whitman writes that he has "no chair, no church, no philosophy." He leads no man to "dinner-table, library, (or) exchange." He is saying, in other words, that that reader will be disappointed who comes to "Song of Myself" seeking some incontrovertible set of concepts by which to live. One of Whitman's most emphasized messages is that he in fact has no message. Or rather, that he has no message of such consistency and rigidity that it could be termed a philosophy, or a religion. His work, his mind, his intentionù-he himselfù-is fluid, not to be understood as being in any way less mobile or active than life itself. He refuses (in lines 1 and 2) to allow himself to be placed In the reader's mind as a pedant of superior and distant attitude. He is saying that he is free, above all, and that he wishes the reader, his companion, to be as freeù-free from scholastic pedantry, free from any sedate or restrictive religion or philosophy, free from the confining atmosphere of the "dinner-table, library, (or) exchange." By "exchange" we can assume Whitman is referring to some specific place where commodities of some sort are bought and sold.
Again, if we return to an earlier part of the poem, we find a clear relationship between Whitman's snubbing of churches and philosophies and the rest of the poem.
"Creeds and schools in abeyance," (Whitman 24), he writes:
Do you guess I have intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have,
and the mica on the side of a rock has (Whitman 38).
Logic and sermons never convince . . . (Whitman 48).
...