XII ENGLISH 2.1: Song of the Open Road: By Walt Whitman :- A Critical Study

 2.1: Song of the Open Road: By Walt Whitman

Q1. What does Song of the Open Road mean?

             Song of the Open Road, poem by Walt Whitman, first published in the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856. The 15-stanza poem is an optimistic paean to wanderlust. Whitman exalts the carefree pleasures of traveling, encouraging others to break free from their stifling domestic attachments to join him.

Q2. What is the theme of song of the open road?

           Major Themes in “Song of the Open Road”: Freedom, joy, and optimism are the major themes of this poem. Throughout the poem, the poet encourages the readers to be true to themselves and live a free life.

Q3. What poetic form is used in Whitman's Song of the Open Road?

            The poem utilizes free verse; the lines are unrhymed and of varying lengths. Song of the Open Road is told from a first person point of view, and the speaker, perhaps Whitman, knows himself very well. In the first stanza, the speaker begins his journey.

Q4. How does the Speaker of song of the open road feel?

         From this stanza, the reader is able to glean several important points: first, the speaker is setting out on the open road on foot. Secondly, he is light-hearted and open to all he is about to experience. Additionally, the speaker recognizes that it is he who is in control of his journey.

Q5. Who is Camerado in Whitman?

             A camerado is Whitman's own term for a friend, or comrade.

Q6. When did Walt Whitman write song of the open road?

             In 1856

Plot / Synopsis:

        The poem can be split in two parts, Sections 1-8 and Sections 9-15. During the first part, Whitman describes the open road “as a metaphorical journey characterized by freedom, independence and affirmations of self, time and place” (Kreidler). During this part, Whitman notices how everything is as it should be. He realizes that along the journey one will face a test of wisdom, but, as stated by Kreidler, “Whitman says, ‘not [the wisdom] finally tested in schools’ (92); rather, the wisdom of the soul, revealed through provoking questions, experiences in nature, and experiences along the journey. Further, he avers happiness is the ‘efflux of the soul,’ flowing out, and ‘falls distilled the charm that mocks beauty and attainment’” (143). During part two, Whitman welcomes company along his journey by repeating “the word ‘Allons’ meaning ‘We go’ or ‘Let's go,’” (Kreidler).

Key Concepts:

              The historical context found in “Song of The Open Road” is describing the westward expansion of the United States, “ an era characterized by the call of adventure and opportunity for those courageous enough make the journey west, i.e. to follow the open road,” (Kreidler). Kreidler discussed how Whitman was greatly influenced by politics and political movements. Using the westward expansion as inspiration in this piece allowed for Whitman’s audience to better understand and relate to this poem. Whitman also incorporates some religious contexts, like referencing Swedenborgianism. Kreidler explains that, “Swedenborgianism espoused a belief that a spiritual component existed within every living and material being. Swedenborg also believed that every part of the body held a particular communication with the Divine.” In Whitman’s poem the readers can see this belief when he starts to introduce the “Song” in Section 7, “Here is the efflux of the soul; / The efflux of the soul comes from within through embowered gates, ever provoking questions.”

 Symbolism:

                 In Whitman’s poem, the reader can find symbolism through the journey of life and the open, democratic society of that time. In the first 8 sections of the poem, Whitman observes the freedoms in life shown through the open road, “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road; Healthy, free, the world before me; The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.” Whitman wants his readers to feel free while reading this, and he wants them to know that he wrote this poem to ensure the feeling of freedom upon them.

The Ending:

                Whitman ends his poem “with the persona awaiting an affirmative response from his reader” (Kummings). The narrator in his poem reaches his hand out to the reader and asks them to join him on the journey. Whitman added this as his poem ending to make the reader question, “will they join him on this journey through the open road?”(Kummings). It is almost as if the narrator doesn’t want to complete the journey of life on his own; he wants the company. This is not a common approach in poem endings, but Whitman also wants to make his readers question, “do you want to complete the journey alone, or do you want to accompany someone for the rest of your life's journey?” By leaving his readers questioning their life choices, Whitman is able to help them figure out their life in a way. 

Summary of Song of the Open Road:

          The Speaker of the poem is describing a trip on which he is embarking. He describes himself as being “healthy and free,” and he realizes he is the only person who is in complete control of his life; he chooses his own destiny. Because of this realization, he does not have to wish or hope or pray for good fortune. He attests that he, himself, is his own good fortune, and that is all he needs. There is nothing that he is lacking. He will reach his destination on his own, and the earth will provide him with anything extra that is necessary. This is not to say that the road he is taking is not paved with imperfections and burdens. Rather than worry, however, the speaker has decided to take those burdens with him and deal with them as they arise.

Analysis of Song of the Open Road:

            Whitman separates his poem into four separate stanzas. With the exception of the first stanza, which contains only three lines, the other stanzas contain four lines of verse. The poet utilizes ‘Free Verse’  technique in the poem, the lines are unrhymed and of varying lengths. “Song of the Open Road” is told from a  point of view, and the speaker, perhaps Whitman, knows himself very well.

            In the first stanza, the speaker begins his journey. Whitman writes:

             “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

              Healthy, free, the world before me,

              The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”

             From this stanza, the reader is able to glean several important points: first, the speaker is setting out on the open road on foot. Secondly, he is light-hearted and open to all he is about to experience.  Additionally,  the speaker recognizes that it is he who is in control of his journey. He will choose where the path will take him on his journey.

            The second stanza continues the thoughts expressed in the first three lines. Whitman writes:

            Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune

            Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

            Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

            Strong and content, I travel the open road.

               The speaker says that he does not have to pray for good luck because he is the maker of his own luck. He will no longer cry or hesitate to do what he wants because he is in need of nothing. He is no longer content with being walled inside; he is strong and happy to be on the open road. In line six, Whitman writes of “querulous criticisms.” The use of Alliteration  here emphasizes the speaker’s carefree tone  which is continued throughout the course of Song of the Open Road.

               In the third stanza, Whitman makes reference to the earth and stars. He writes:

              The earth, that is sufficient,

              I do not want the constellations any nearer,

              I know they are very well where they are,

              I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

                 Here, the speaker seems to separate himself from others. He says the earth is fine the way it is; he does not desire to be any closer to the stars than he already is. He knows they are fine where they are, and he knows they are good enough for those who belong to them. This last line is in strong contrast to the rest of the poem, where the speaker emphasizes his free will and independence, which means he probably does not include himself in the group of people who belong to the constellations. He does not belong to them because he does not need them.

                 The fourth stanza is physically separated from the rest of the poem by Whitman’s use of parentheses. He writes:

                   (Still I carry my old delicious burdens,

                  I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,

                  I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

                  I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

              Whitman’s use of parentheses here makes the stanza more of an aside than its own separate being; it is almost an afterthought that the speaker decides to throw in, but it is still important to Song of the Open Road. Here, the speaker admits that he is not without his own problems, but instead of fretting, he relishes them. The reader can see this through Whitman’s diction. His use of the word delicious is no accident; through that word, Whitman conveys the sense of relish the speaker feels for his burden. In the second line of the final stanza, the speaker admits to all that he carries them with him wherever he goes; this thought is continued in the final two lines of the poem. The speaker declares that he cannot rid himself of them; instead, he and his burdens share a symbiotic relationship of sorts: he is filled with his burdens, and in return, he fills them. The speaker is stating here that his burdens do not define him; rather, he accepts them and carries them with him wherever he goes.

Historical Significance:

              Like many of the poems contained in Whitman’s seminal work, Leaves of Grass, this poem is an Ode  to one’s self. Whitman revels in his own independence and ability to control his life, and this idea of self-determinism has continued to influence readers since the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855.

Themes:

1) Democracy As a Way of Life:

               Whitman envisioned democracy not just as a political system but as a way of experiencing the world. In the early nineteenth century, people still harbored many doubts about whether the United States could survive as a country and about whether democracy could thrive as a political system. To allay those fears and to praise democracy, Whitman tried to be democratic in both life and poetry. He imagined democracy as a way of interpersonal interaction and as a way for individuals to integrate their beliefs into their everyday lives. “Song of Myself” notes that democracy must include all individuals equally, or else it will fail.

               In his poetry, Whitman widened the possibilities of Poetic diction by including slang, colloquialisms, and regional dialects, rather than employing the stiff, erudite language so often found in nineteenth-century verse. Similarly, he broadened the possibilities of subject matter by describing myriad people and places. Like William Wordsworth, Whitman believed that everyday life and everyday people were fit subjects for poetry. Although much of Whitman’s work does not explicitly discuss politics, most of it implicitly deals with democracy: it describes communities of people coming together, and it imagines many voices pouring into a unified whole. For Whitman, democracy was an idea that could and should permeate the world beyond politics, making itself felt in the ways we think, speak, work, fight, and even make art.

2) The Cycle of Growth and Death:

                Whitman’s poetry reflects the vitality and growth of the early United States. During the nineteenth century, America expanded at a tremendous rate, and its growth and potential seemed limitless. But sectionalism and the violence of the Civil War threatened to break apart and destroy the boundless possibilities of the United States. As a way of dealing with both the population growth and the massive deaths during the Civil War, Whitman focused on the life cycles of individuals: people are born, they age and reproduce, and they die. Such poems as “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” imagine death as an integral part of life. The Speaker of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” realizes that flowers die in the winter, but they rebloom in the springtime, and he vows to mourn his fallen friends every year just as new buds are appearing. Describing the life cycle of nature helped Whitman contextualize the severe injuries and trauma he witnessed during the Civil War—linking death to life helped give the deaths of so many soldiers meaning.

3) The Beauty of the Individual:

                Throughout his poetry, Whitman praised the individual. He imagined a democratic nation as a unified whole composed of unique but equal individuals. “Song of Myself” opens in a triumphant paean to the individual: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” (1). Elsewhere the speaker of that exuberant poem identifies himself as Walt Whitman and claims that, through him, the voices of many will speak. In this way, many individuals make up the individual democracy, a single entity composed of myriad parts. Every voice and every part will carry the same weight within the single democracy—and thus every voice and every individual is equally beautiful. Despite this pluralist view, Whitman still singled out specific individuals for praise in his poetry, particularly Abraham Lincoln. In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated, and Whitman began composing several Elegies, including “O Captain! My Captain!” Although all individuals were beautiful and worthy of praise, some individuals merited their own poems because of their contributions to society and democracy.

Motifs:

1) Lists:

             Whitman filled his poetry with long lists. Often a sentence will be broken into many clauses, separated by commas, and each clause will describe some scene, person, or object. These lists create a sense of expansiveness in the poem, as they mirror the growth of the United States. Also, these lists layer images atop one another to reflect the diversity of American landscapes and people. In “Song of Myself,” for example, the speaker lists several adjectives to describe Walt Whitman in section 24. The speaker uses multiple adjectives to demonstrate the complexity of the individual: true individuals cannot be described using just one or two words. Later in this section, the speaker also lists the different types of voices who speak through Whitman. Lists are another way of demonstrating democracy in action: in lists, all items possess equal weight, and no item is more important than another item in the list. In a democracy, all individuals possess equal weight, and no individual is more important than another.

2) The Human Body:

                Whitman’s poetry revels in its depictions of the human body and the body’s capacity for physical contact. The speaker of “Song of Myself” claims that “copulation is no more rank to me than death is” (521) to demonstrate the naturalness of taking pleasure in the body’s physical possibilities. With physical contact comes spiritual communion: two touching bodies form one individual unit of togetherness. Several poems praise the bodies of both women and men, describing them at work, at play, and interacting. The speaker of “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855) boldly praises the perfection of the human form and worships the body because the body houses the soul. This free expression of sexuality horrified some of Whitman’s early readers, and Whitman was fired from his job at the Indian Bureau in 1865 because the secretary of the interior found Leaves of Grass offensive. Whitman’s unabashed praise of the male form has led many critics to argue that he was homosexual or bisexual, but the repressive culture of the nineteenth century prevented him from truly expressing those feelings in his work.

3) Rhythm and Incantation:

             Many of Whitman’s poems rely on Rhythm and repetition to create a captivating, spellbinding quality of incantation. Often, Whitman begins several lines in a row with the same word or phrase, a literary device called Anaphora. For example, the first four lines of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1865) each begin with the word when. The long lines of such poems as “Song of Myself” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” force readers to inhale several bits of text without pausing for breath, and this breathlessness contributes to the incantatory quality of the poems. Generally, the anaphora and the rhythm transform the poems into celebratory chants, and the joyous form and structure reflect the joyousness of the poetic content. Elsewhere, however, the repetition and rhythm contribute to an elegiac tone, as in “O Captain! My Captain!” This poem uses short lines and words, such as heart and father, to mournfully incant an elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

Symbols:

1) Plants:

                Throughout Whitman’s poetry, plant life symbolizes both growth and multiplicity. Rapid, regular plant growth also stands in for the rapid, regular expansion of the population of the United States. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman uses flowers, bushes, wheat, trees, and other plant life to signify the possibilities of regeneration and re-growth after death. As the speaker mourns the loss of Lincoln, he drops a lilac spray onto the coffin; the act of laying a flower on the coffin not only honors the person who has died but lends death a measure of dignity and respect. The title Leaves of Grass highlights another of Whitman’s themes: the beauty of the individual. Each leaf or blade of grass possesses its own distinct beauty, and together the blades form a beautiful, unified whole, an idea Whitman explores in the sixth section of “Song of Myself.” Multiple leaves of grass thus symbolize democracy, another instance of a beautiful whole composed of individual parts. In 1860, Whitman published an edition of Leaves of Grass that included a number of poems celebrating love between men. He titled this section “The Calamus Poems,” after the phallic calamus plant.

2) The Self:

               Whitman’s interest in the self ties into his praise of the individual. Whitman links the self to the conception of poetry throughout his work, envisioning the self as the birthplace of poetry. Most of his poems are spoken from the first person, using the pronoun I. The speaker of Whitman’s most famous poem, “Song of Myself,” even assumes the name Walt Whitman, but nevertheless the speaker remains a fictional creation employed by the poet Whitman. Although Whitman borrows from his own autobiography for some of the speaker’s experiences, he also borrows many experiences from popular works of art, music, and literature. Repeatedly the speaker of this poem exclaims that he contains everything and everyone, which is a way for Whitman to reimagine the boundary between the self and the world. By imaging a person capable of carrying the entire world within him, Whitman can create an elaborate analogy about the ideal democracy, which would, like the self, be capable of containing the whole world.

Some Questions

Q1. Describe Whitman’s conceptions of the soul and the body, and the relationship between the two. Which is more important, in his view?

              The soul and the body are inextricably linked for Whitman. While the soul is the ultimate repository of the self, and connection between souls is the highest order of relating, the body is the vessel that allows the soul to experience the world. Therefore the body is just as important. This is why he says in “Starting from Paumanok” that he will make his poems from the body and from material things, for the soul will follow from those. The body is also the source of identity in the world and the means for connection to others. Thus in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” he speaks of the body as one’s identity: it is the means by which different generations can experience the same thing (in this case the ferry crossing). Whitman values both the soul and the body, but the body is much easier to work with.

Q2. How do you account for the eroticism in Whitman’s poetry? Does he use homosexual eroticism differently from heterosexual eroticism?

             Eroticism, in Whitman’s poetry, symbolizes the profound but always incomplete communion between people. Sex is as close as two people can get to becoming one, but the physical body, while it enables this closeness, is also a barrier to complete connection. Heterosexual eroticism is often used to discuss childbearing, which comes out of the same generative process that creates poetry. Homoeroticism, since it is purely about the connection between two people and has no biological function, can be used to talk about a broader range of ideas. In particular, homoeroticism comes to symbolize the kind of valorization of the body and the kind of sympathetic connection between people that Whitman values most.

Q3. What kinds of structures does Whitman use in his poetry? Why might he be using these rather than traditional structures like rhyme?

                  Two of the most important structures in Whitman’s poetry are the list and the anecdote. The list enables Whitman to present a great number of disparate items without having to make any claims as to their relative worth; this is a truly democratic way of presenting material. It is also an easy way for him to go about cataloguing America, a nation that is raw material for poetry. Anecdotes, on the other hand, are a way for him to demonstrate the kind of sympathetic experience he hopes his poetry will be. When he presents a story he’s heard from another, he presents it as something that has become so real to him that he feels he has experienced it himself. This kind of intense connection between people is the goal of Whitman’s poetry. He avoids traditional structures like rhyme because he wants to show that his is a truly American poetry, one that is fresh and new, and not indebted to previous poets from other countries.

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