Compare and Contrast “Song of myself” by Walt Whitman

Anthony Ryder Sunday, October 07, 2007
English 2306


Compare and Contrast “Song of myself” by Walt Whitman
and “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman is about a poet who rediscovers himself as a human being with a body and a soul. Beyond that it is also a story about the connection and the continuity reestablished between the poet and the entire creation of God. The journey of rediscovery starts with the narrator’s commemoration of the awareness of his own consciousness. Then it gradually elevates the meaning of his own being to his intimacy with his own soul and how much he feels and appreciates that intimacy. Then the narrator expands by arguing that his own body is made of parts that participate in the proclamation of the entire and serene creation of God.

The narrator realizes that he is not alone in this journey on earth because he is surrounded by his fellowmen, brothers and sisters with which he shares sentiments of love. He is also certainly surrounded by plants, and all the other non-living matters and he tries to prove in his deliberately lengthy poem that he identifies himself as an intrinsic component of everything around him. Death is then explained in this entire spectrum as a mean by which the narrator is ‘recycled’ and he integrates inside the other myriads of God’s creation.

“Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a poem that evolves around a theme of a wind blowing naturally during a day in Autumn. The poet who observes the phenomenon shares so eloquently to the reader his feelings on the effects of the wind to himself and to the dead leaves.

Whitman is a heavy user of symbolism as opposed to Shelley who is not as efficient as he is in the exploitation of this powerful device in poetry. In line 1, Whitman uses the word ‘myself’ as a symbol of all mankind as well as the entire creation of God. Line 1 reads:
“ I celebrate myself, and sing myself,”

The poet wants to reach out to the entire creation. But the symbolism presented in that introductory line of the poem is not straightforward in relating easily with the entire cosmos it meant to embrace. Fortunately, the reader gets back on track in line 3 and understands the symbolism of the whole universe behind the word “myself” only after examining the universal nature of atoms and thus the attempt at referring to the entire cosmos. Line 3 reads:

“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Other examples of symbolism lie in line 99, 235, 497, 519, 523, 532, 542 and 552.
In line 99, a child asks the poet a question about the meaning of grass. The poet portrays ‘grass’ as a pure symbol of the child himself as he demonstrates it in line 105:

“Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.”

In line 102, the poet refers to the same grass also as a symbol of God. Line 102 reads:

“Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord.”

The poet uses effectively these symbols to put an emphasis on the silent or unspoken cyclic transformation that ultimately unite him and all the other components of the creation. That transformation takes place through the process of life, death and through what could be understood as a permutation of the role played under the sun by humans, animals, plants and all the other existing matters of the cosmos. Lines 125 to 130 explain that concept in these terms:
“They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

Following up on his conversation with the child about the meaning of grass, Whitman does an awesome and effective job when he elaborates extensively and beautifully on the symbolism of grass and the interchangeability of the elements of the cosmic universe.

In the example below, Whitman explains that animals are also the symbol of the creation. From lines 235 we read:
“Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

Whitman considers that he is a symbol of the cosmos itself. In this regard, he succeeds in proving the point that he is a piece of the universe in several ways. He assimilates with the prisoners, the slaves, the thieves, and even the dwarfs!
From lines 508 we read:
“Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,”

Whitman also views himself as a real symbol of the world of insects and animals. Line 515 reads:
“Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.”

In addition, he sees himself as a representative of non living matters such as stars. From line 512 we reads:

“And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,”


Whitman finds symbols of creations in his own body parts. The narrator strives extensively to stress that several symbols of the creation are stuffed inside his anatomical body. Here are a few examples.
From line 519 we read:

“I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,”

From line 523 we read:

“Seeing, hearing, feeling are the miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle
…
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.”

From line 532 we can read:

“You my rich blood! Your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!”

From line 542 we read:

“Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my
winding paths, it shall be you!
Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d,
it shall be you.”

In the following passages, Whitman makes a much greater effort than Shelley does in exploring the imagery device. Whitman allows the reader to visualize the group of swimming men described in his work, with water dripping from their bodies while being secretly watched through the blinds of a window of a nearby house located close to the shore, by a secret female admirer. The poet has recorded all that scenery with his eye balls and has translated that into his claim that the swimmers and the lady are all pieces of the same unified creation.
For example, from lines 202 to 204 we read:

“She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?”

and from lines 210 to 213 we read:

“The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
it descended trembling from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them.”

In contrast to Whitman, Shelley uses a more conventional and structured writing style that achieve to convince the skeptical reader in a timely fashion that Shelley conveys his message to the reader quicker than does Whitman. Shelley’s work is composed of five cantos each of which contains four triplets and a couplet. Each triplet is poetically written in a terza rima style, consisting of three lines of ten or eleven syllables each. In addition, each line is methodically written in a rhythm of iambic pentameter. From the first to the last line every syllable is rigorously synchronized by the contributions of the iambic pentameters, the terza rimas and the cantos. Certainly the poet, engulfed by the emotional intensity as he witnesses an harmonic wonder of mother’s nature unfolding in front of his naked eyes, did not find any better way other than to borrow this concordant cantos structure so he could capture and translate to the reader the depth of the lyric exaltation of his feelings. One example excerpt of Shelley’s 70 lines of iambic pentamers is in line 67 that reads as follow:

x / x / x / x / x /
A-shes and sparks, my words a-mong man-kind!

The symbol “x” represents an unstressed syllable, the symbol “/” represents a stressed syllable and each consecutive “x” and “/” form one iambic foot.
An example excerpt of one of Shelley’s 20 triplets of terza rima starts from line 57 and reads as follow:

“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies.”

An example excerpt of one of Shelley’s five couplets is found at the bottom of the first canto. It reads as follow:

“Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!”

To the contrary of Whitman who advocates vehemently for the recognition of free verses, Shelley uses copiously the end of rhyme device in his poem, thus he succeeds in my opinion in sharing with the reader the sense of congruity he has discovered inside the phenomenon he is observing. At the same time, he spreads the end of rhyme devices in his entire poem just like pollens of flowers are dispersed by the wind, with certainly the intent of sharing with the reader the intensity of his euphoria and admiration about what he is witnessing.
For example, from lines 32 to 35 below, “bay” rhyme with “day” and “towers” rhyme with “flowers”:
“Beside a purnice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers”

Furthermore, Shelley brutally has opened up the first line of his poem with an easily noticeable alliteration that focuses on the alphabetical letter “w”. Certainly, he wants to appeal to the reader’s ear that a wind is blowing, better heard, a west wind is forcefully moving, or better emphasized, a wild west wind is in action. Line 1 reads as follow:

“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,”

The use of the alliteration device help Shelley makes his case easier than the counterpart Whitman.
To his advantage, Shelley uses the metaphor device more than does Whitman. For example, in line 13, he uses a metaphor as he identifies the wind as a wild spirit. Line 13 read as follow:

“Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;”

In the last terza rima of the fourth canto, he exploits a metaphor device once again to share to the reader his intent of participating and being an intrinsic part of the phenomenon. He prays feverously so he could be carried away by the wind just like what he witnesses that happened to dead leaves, waves or clouds. Triplet 16 reads as follow:

“As thus with thee prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

Shelley uses the personification device when he compares the clouds to the angels of rain and lightning.
“Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread”


In his poem “Song of Myself”, Walt Whitman promotes the use of free verse as a new medium for expression among his contemporaries. To make his case about the unity of creation, Walt Whitman has focused profusely on the use of symbolism. Percy Shelley, however, has emphasized more on the use of figurative languages in his poem “Ode to the West Wind.” In addition, his poem could be consider a classical and inspiring example of the use of the iambic pentameter, the terza rima and finally the conta.


Works Cited.

Shelley, Percy. Ode to the West Wind. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fifth edition.
Norton & Company. 2005: 872.

Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself .The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fifth edition.
Norton & Company. 2005: 1060-1066.