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. Whitman says that he celebrates himself and that all parts of him are also parts of the reader. He is thirty-seven years old and “in perfect health” and begins his journey “Hoping to cease not till death.” He puts all “Creeds and schools in abeyance” hoping to set out on his own, though he admits he will not forget these things. Whitman then describes a house in which “the shelves are / crowded with perfumes” and he breathes in the fragrance though he refuses to let himself become intoxicated with it. Instead, he seeks to “go to the bank by the wood” and become naked and undisguised where he can hear all of nature around him. Whitman describes an encounter between his body and soul. He invites his soul to “loafe with me on the grass” and to lull him with its “valved voice.” Whitman recalls a scene in which a child came to him with a handful of grass and asked him what it was. Whitman has no answer for the child. The grass is “the flag of my disposition” and it is the “handkerchief of the Lord….” It is also the child or a symbol for all of humanity. Whitman sees the grass sprouting from the chests of young men, the heads of old women, and the beards of old men.
Whitman describes groups of people that he stops to observe. The first is a “butcher-boy” sharpening his knife and dancing. He sees the blacksmiths taking on their “grimy” work with precision. Whitman then observes a “negro” as he works a team of horses at a construction site. Whitman admires his chiseled body and “his polish’d and perfect limbs.” He sees and loves this “picturesque giant….” He admits in the next poem that he is “enamour’d…Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes / and mauls… / I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.” Whitman describes himself as “old and young” and “foolish as much as…wise….” He is “Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man….” He is of all the land of North America from the South even into Canada. He notes that these are not his own original thoughts.
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