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 manner of man. He alludes to and confronts past swear outs to this research by utilizing as his substitution scene the leaves of hatful. 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 semblance to God and establishes the transient, finite nature of man. Whitman responds throughout this poem to the Biblical set to the question of life. Emphasizing the cyclical process of nature, Whitman constructs his poem to insist that the life of man, as in natur e, moves non with linear progression, but rather in a cyclical sequence. 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 offer 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 blanket to the reader, stating How could I answer the chil... ...ot ceased to exist but rather now ride out their existence alive and well in the ambiguous somewhere. Whitman will not accept the Biblical understanding of death as a qualifying to either heaven or hell. He claims instead that to die is divers(prenominal) from what any one supposed, and luckier. This fortuitous death he would apply to any 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 outward . . 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.