Poem: Song of Myself

Overview
“Song of Myself” presents a speaker who announces a radical, expansive identity and invites the reader into a shared, democratic consciousness. Beginning with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” the poem asserts that the “I” stands for every person, a self porous to the world, absorbing and reflecting multitudes. Across a sweeping, free-verse journey, the speaker wanders through cities and prairies, work sites and bedrooms, encounters strangers and intimates, and folds every scene into a single inclusive being. The poem’s movement is associative rather than plot-driven, but it builds a cumulative vision: the individual self and the universe are inseparable, and to know one’s own body and mind is to perceive the cosmos.

Voice and Structure
The voice is direct, hospitable, and often erotic, shifting from proclamation to meditation to address. Long lines, parallel phrases, and cascading catalogs create momentum, as if the poem must keep widening to accommodate new people, places, and sensations. The speaker repeatedly breaks the boundary between text and reader, insisting on a palpable presence, breathing, touching, and looking back at “you.” Scenes and identities blur: the poet is at once loafer on the grass, carpenter, mother, trapper, sailor, Quaker, and runaway slave. By refusing strict transitions, the poem enacts its central claim that all experiences flow into each other inside the capacious self.

Self, Democracy, and Unity
Calling himself “a kosmos,” the speaker models an American self that includes every rank and region. He praises laborers and lovers, immigrants and the poor, the sick and the marginalized, seeing no hierarchy among them. Empathy is embodied: he nurses the wounded, shelters the runaway slave, enters the lives of prostitutes, and refuses to judge. Contradiction is embraced rather than resolved, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” This largeness answers a democratic desire: to hold difference without erasing it, to turn private experience into public kinship, and to affirm that the “en-masse” and the singular “I” are one.

Nature, Body, and the Sacred
The poem treats the body as sacred text and nature as teacher. Grass becomes a central emblem: a child asks what it is, and the poet answers variously, flag of disposition, handkerchief of God, a uniform hieroglyph of all people, a growth that rises from the mouths of the dead. The ordinary is transfigured; sweat, breath, and the senses are routes to revelation. Erotic passages, most famously the union with the soul and the vision of the twenty-eight bathers, refuse shame and collapse the divide between spiritual and physical ecstasy. Animals, unburdened by guilt or self-doubt, embody the free, self-possessed state the poet seeks.

Death, Transcendence, and Ending
Death appears not as negation but as transition. The speaker insists that every atom belonging to him belongs to you, and that what falls into the earth rises again in other forms. He imagines dissolving into air and soil, bequeathing himself to the dirt to grow from the grass he loves. Late in the poem he sounds his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” a cry of vitality whose echo the reader is invited to follow. The closing promise is intimate and practical: “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” The poet departs but does not disappear, “stop[ping] somewhere waiting for you,” leaving the reader with a felt sense that the self, the body, the nation, and the universe are one ongoing exchange.