He invites his soul to “loafe with me on the grass” and to lull him with its “valved voice.” He tells his soul to settle upon him, “your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d / over upon me….” He invites his soul to undress him and reach inside him until the soul feels his feet. Whitman then describes an encounter between his body and soul. He no longer holds these pretensions, however. Whitman sees all the things around him – “The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old / and new,” but he knows that “they are not the Me myself.” He remembers in his own past that he once “sweated through fog” with fashionable arguments. This is the “urge” of the world which calls to him. Instead, he rejects talk of the past or future for an experience in the now. Whitman says that he has heard “what the talkers were talking, the talk of the / beginning and the end,” but he refuses to talk of either. 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 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. 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. He says that he celebrates himself and that all parts of him are also parts of the reader. Whitman begins this poem by naming its subject – himself.
0 kommentar(er)
