Whitman

Walt Whitman

1.

Ok, nerd alert, but all of this atom talk make me think of the series 1 finale of Doctor Who, when Rose turns into the Bad Wolf and tells the Dalek Emperor, “I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them.” Maybe it’s just because every time I see “atom” in this sense I hear it in Bad Wolf Rose’s voice. There’s actually something sort of Whitman-esque in the whole Bad Wolf speech, because it talks a lot about the whole of creation and power over that, but I digress.

This is really an introduction to what “Song of Myself” will be about. It reminds me of the first introductory sonnet of Astrophil and Stella. The most poetic thing to me in this is the repetition. It gives the poem a lilting rhythm, sort of a swinging back and forth.

5.

This is a pastoral strophe, and it’s also very holistic and natural, with the lovers loafing in the grass, and the only man-made image is the fence (and even that seems pretty natural). The repetition present in the first strophe is also really prevalent here; the whole last stanza has each line starting with “and”, which gives it sort of a rambling, stream-of-consciousness feeling. We also get the idea of sex and bodies leading to ideas, as his tryst and “loafe in the grass” leads him to contemplate nature and God.

8.

Even though it is free verse, there is a rhythm to Whitman’s poetry that’s especially noticeable in this strophe. Even if it’s not necessarily iambic pentameter, there’s a lilting rhythm to “The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill” (150). The repetition adds to the sense of the mundane brought by the everyday images, because many of these are not big things; they’re the drone of the everyday that no one really notices.