Summary and Form
This most famous of Whitman’s works was one of the original
twelve pieces in the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. Like
most of the other poems, it too was revised extensively, reaching
its final permutation in 1881. “Song of Myself” is a sprawling combination
of biography, sermon, and poetic meditation. It is not nearly as heavy-handed
in its pronouncements as “Starting
at Paumanok”; rather, Whitman uses symbols and sly
commentary to get at important issues. “Song of Myself” is composed
more of vignettes than lists: Whitman uses small, precisely drawn
scenes to do his work here.
This poem did not take on the title “Song of Myself” until
the 1881 edition. Previous to that it had been titled “Poem of Walt
Whitman, an American” and, in the 1860, 1867, and 1871 editions,
simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title suggests something
of what Whitman was about in this piece. As Walt Whitman, the specific
individual, melts away into the abstract “Myself,” the poem explores
the possibilities for communion between individuals. Starting from
the premise that “what I assume you shall assume” Whitman tries
to prove that he both encompasses and is indistinguishable from
the universe.
Commentary
Whitman’s grand poem is, in its way, an American epic.
Beginning in medias res—in the middle of the poet’s life—it
loosely follows a quest pattern. “Missing me one place search another,”
he tells his reader, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” In its
catalogues of American life and its constant search for the boundaries
of the self “Song of Myself” has much in common with classical epic.
This epic sense of purpose, though, is coupled with an almost Keatsian valorization
of repose and passive perception. Since for Whitman the birthplace of
poetry is in the self, the best way to learn about poetry is to
relax and watch the workings of one’s own mind.
While “Song of Myself” is crammed with significant detail,
there are three key episodes that must be examined. The first of
these is found in the sixth section of the poem. A child asks the
narrator “What is the grass?” and the narrator
is forced to explore his own use of symbolism and his inability
to break things down to essential principles. The bunches of grass
in the child’s hands become a symbol of the regeneration in nature.
But they also signify a common material that links disparate people
all over the United States together: grass, the ultimate symbol
of democracy, grows everywhere. In the wake of the Civil War the
grass reminds Whitman of graves: grass feeds on the bodies of the
dead. Everyone must die eventually, and so the natural roots of
democracy are therefore in mortality, whether due to natural causes
or to the bloodshed of internecine warfare. While Whitman normally
revels in this kind of symbolic indeterminacy, here it troubles him
a bit. “I wish I could translate the hints,” he says, suggesting
that the boundary between encompassing everything and saying nothing
is easily crossed.
The second episode is more optimistic. The famous “twenty-ninth
bather” can be found in the eleventh section of the poem. In this
section a woman watches twenty-eight young men bathing in the ocean.
She fantasizes about joining them unseen, and describes their semi-nude
bodies in some detail. The invisible twenty-ninth bather offers
a model of being much like that of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”:
to truly experience the world one must be fully in it and of it,
yet distinct enough from it to have some perspective, and invisible
so as not to interfere with it unduly. This paradoxical set of conditions
describes perfectly the poetic stance Whitman tries to assume. The
lavish eroticism of this section reinforces this idea: sexual contact
allows two people to become one yet not one—it offers a moment of
transcendence. As the female spectator introduced in the beginning
of the section fades away, and Whitman’s voice takes over, the eroticism
becomes homoeroticism. Again this is not so much the expression
of a sexual preference as it is the longing for communion with every living
being and a connection that makes use of both the body and the soul
(although Whitman is certainly using the homoerotic sincerely, and
in other ways too, particularly for shock value).
Having worked through some of the conditions of perception
and creation, Whitman arrives, in the third key episode, at a moment
where speech becomes necessary. In the twenty-fifth section he notes
that “Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure
itself, / It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, / Walt
you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?” Having
already established that he can have a sympathetic experience when
he encounters others (“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,
I myself become the wounded person”), he must find a way to re-transmit
that experience without falsifying or diminishing it. Resisting
easy answers, he later vows he “will never translate [him]self at
all.” Instead he takes a philosophically more rigorous stance: “What
is known I strip away.” Again Whitman’s position is similar to that
of Emerson, who says of himself, “I am the unsettler.” Whitman,
however, is a poet, and he must reassemble after unsettling: he
must “let it out then.” Having catalogued a continent and encompassed
its multitudes, he finally decides: “I too am not a bit tamed, I
too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs
of the world.” “Song of Myself” thus ends with a sound—a yawp—that
could be described as either pre- or post-linguistic. Lacking any
of the normal communicative properties of language, Whitman’s yawp
is the release of the “kosmos” within him, a sound at the borderline
between saying everything and saying nothing. More than anything,
the yawp is an invitation to the next Walt Whitman, to read into
the yawp, to have a sympathetic experience, to absorb it as part
of a new multitude.
