The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

These lines (324–329) come at the end of section 15, after the speaker has presented an extended list of different types of people engaged in a wide range of activities. The list that takes up most of the section offers something of an overhead view of the social environment in which the speaker exists. In the final lines of the section, the speaker zooms even further out. No longer focused on the different types of individuals who live around him, he begins to think about what unites the diversity of folks across their differences. Thus, whether people live in the city or the country, they all sleep. Indeed, everyone, whether living or dead, may be said to “sleep for their time.” Likewise, all husbands, whether young or old, sleep next to their wives. These generalizing thoughts lead the speaker to a final consideration of his own relation to all the diverse people around him. Because he carries them in his thoughts, they “tend inward” to him just as he “tend[s] outward” to them. It is this abstract, two-way channel of mental energy that enables the speaker to feel a sense of connection to the world around him.

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.

The speaker declaims these lines (422–424) at the opening of section 21. This quotation encapsulates one of the poem’s key themes: the unity of opposites. In Western culture, going all the way back to the Greeks, there has been a stark divide between the body and the soul, each of which have been invested with opposing values. For instance, the body is symbolically linked to flesh, irrationality, sensuality, and sin. By contrast, the soul is symbolically correlated to the mind, rationality, contemplation, and virtue. Here, however, the speaker resolutely refuses to choose between these apparently opposing concepts. That is, he will attend to the body as much as to the soul. The speaker’s refusal implicitly rejects the binary logic of Christianity, in which a soul is destined for either “the pleasures of heaven” or “the pains of hell.” By refusing to choose one or the other, the speaker gains access to both. And by thus internalizing a wider range of experience, the speaker’s sense of self “increase[s],” which in turn expands his mind and becomes part of his poetry. The implicit lesson here is that adhering too closely to binary oppositions restricts our sense of what’s possible.

You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

These lines (448–453) open section 22, where the speaker issues an appeal to the sea. This quotation reflects the speaker’s fascination with the material reality of the living world—which is to say, the world of flesh, bone, dirt, and stone. The sea is just as much a part of the material world as anything else on earth, and here the speaker declares his willingness to “resign” himself to this great force. On the one hand, the speaker’s resignation reflects a desire to succumb and hence to become part of something much bigger than himself. Yet the speaker’s words also carry more than a hint of sexual innuendo. He makes this suggestion in part through his reference to getting undressed and “hav[ing] a turn” with the sea. He also implicitly sexualizes the sea when imagining its “crooked inviting fingers” caressing the shore. And, if we haven’t gotten the hint yet, he finally commands the sea to “dash me with amorous wet.” This sexualization of the sea reflects the deep pleasure the speaker takes in his physical relation to the material world.

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

In these lines (1183–89) from section 45, the speaker indulges in a cosmic vision that moves far beyond the confines of the earth that he has elsewhere celebrated so robustly. The key image of this quote is one of expansion. As his awareness moves outward from the earth, the speaker imagines “the far-sprinkled systems” of stars in the outer reaches of space. In a prescient image of an expanding universe, the speaker speculates that these stars constantly spread wider, “always expanding, / Outward and outward and forever outward.” Here, Whitman uses his characteristic technique of repetition, harnessing the power of rhetorical excess to amplify the scale of his image. After establishing the magnitude of this image, the speaker then multiplies it further. He does so by suggesting that each star may have its own solar system, and thus “join[s] with his partners a group of superior circuit.” This cosmic image implicitly mirrors the speaker’s thoughts about the nature of the human mind. Just as the universe expands in both size and complexity, so too does the mind, which is similarly all-encompassing.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Perhaps no quotation from “Song of Myself” is more famous than this one, which appears in the middle of section 51 (lines 1323–25). Coming, as these lines do, at the end of the poem, they offer something of a summary of the work as a whole. Up to this point, the speaker has covered a lot of ground. He’s offered epic lists of people, flora, and fauna. He’s recounted various vignettes about particular people he’s met or heard about. He’s even given accounts of battles from the Mexican and Revolutionary Wars. All along, he’s also offered a series of declarations about his own thoughts and beliefs about himself and the world around him. Now, nearing the poem’s end, our highly self-aware speaker suspects that he’s probably made contradictory statements somewhere in what’s come before. Yet instead of apologizing for such contradiction, which would recognize it as a problem, he claims it as another positive aspect of himself. He indicates that if he contradicts himself, then we simply have to accept the contradiction. Crucially, though, we have to accept it because the contradiction expresses a deeper truth: that the speaker’s mind is capacious enough to encompass and resolve opposing ideas.

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