Whitmans Song of Myself and The Nature of Life Essay -- Song of Mysel

Whitmans Song of Myself and The Nature of Life Identifying the mystery of existence, Whitman writes Song of Myself, section half-dozen to question the nature of the behavior of man. He alludes to and confronts past settlements to this ask by utilizing as his primaeval theatrical role the leaves of toilet. In the Christian tradition, the Bible utilizes this image of grass to describe the lives of work force. Isaiah, a prophet of God cries out, All men are like grass . . . and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, . . . but the word of the Lord stands forever (Isaiah 406-8). The scriptural image of men as grass, the handkerchief of the Lord, places man in carnal knowledge to God and establishes the transient, finite nature of man. Whitman responds throughout this poem to the Biblical react to the question of life. Emphasizing the cyclical process of nature, Whitman constructs his poem to insist that the life of ma n, as in nature, moves non with linear progression, but rather in a cyclical succession. Birth and death, Whitman asserts, serve non as bookends to a concise life span, but rather as connections in a larger continuum of existence. Whitman utilizes an imagist technique relating a series of associated images through a central connection. Whitman first presents the reader with the image of a small child religious offering up grass with the question, What is the grass. In light of the scriptural connection Whitman provides, this query What is the grass from the lips of a child presents the larger question of what is man. Whitman chooses not to answer this question directly, but rather to present possibilities and proffer the question subscribe to the reader, stating How could I answer the chil... ...ot ceased to exist but rather now watch their existence alive and well in the ambiguous somewhere. Whitman will not accept the Biblical understanding of death as a transitio n to either heaven or hell. He claims instead that to die is antithetical from what any one supposed, and luckier. This fortuitous death he would apply to every(prenominal) man, not reserving destruction for any man. Death, if it truly exists, for Whitman, leads only forward to life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it. Stating All goes onward and outwards . . and nothing collapses, Whitman affirms the view of mans earthly life as a succession rather than a progression and claims for man a part in a larger cyclical continuum of existence. Works CitedWhitman, Walt. Song of Myself. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Ed, Paul Lauter. Boston,NewYork Houghton Mifflin, 1998.