Reading reaction-Song of Myself

[Luke]

In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman seems engaged in not just himself
but the people he observes and the nature that’s surrounds him. He
doesn’t necessarily contemplate his life as a human being but how we
are so much apart of our own nature from the beginning of our lives to
the end. For example, “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from
this soul, this air, Born here of parents born here from the parents
the same, and their parents the same.”

In the second section, he becomes a little absurd when he expresses
his love for the atmosphere and how passionate he is for it. “It is
my mouth forever, I am in love with it”. You could expect this section
to be rhythmic and rhyme from line to line but he tends to throw off
like he’s a madman.

Whitman’s use of poetry and words contain a lot of weight and depth
to try to explain his observations and thoughts. He becomes very
repetitive at the start of each verse to set off his emotions and
anguish. He turns his most simplest thoughts into the most complex in
the entire poem.

He observes the man hunt of twenty-men in section eleven for one
woman’s love. How they long to feel a woman’s touch and her the same.
“The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their
long hair, Little streams passed over their bodies”. I felt it was
the most engaging part of the poem because it represented the sexual
tension between of a man and a woman.

Whitman’s tranquil poem, “Song of Myself”, showed that he was on a
very different platform than his people. In his time period, people
would portray him as a lunatic.