A Poem for All

Scanning the lines of a text, I seldom experience a swell in my chest that expands when a poem balloons into a perfect symphony of lyrical, phonetic, stylistic, and conceptual elements to produce meaning. Whitman’s poem, “I Sing the Body Electric”, is just that.

Illustration by Carolina Diaz

Walt Whitman was a secular man with a democratic vision for his country. In his epic, Leaves of Grass, he writes for all. The poem, “I Sing the Body Electric”, which is one of the earliest poems in the epic, foregrounds a universal love for mankind. In his view, everyone is sacred. He embraces the fluidity and variations of human nature by elevating human beings to a praiseworthy tribe with a diversity that the holiness of religiosity condemns.

A subject of numerous controversies in his time, his sexuality had been under scrutiny – he being a public figure – for his poems blurred the distinction between brotherly love and romantic love to many. He denied liking men. There were several men who claimed Whitman having behaved suggestively with them, but their credibility remains debatable.

Most importantly, Whitman continues to be the ideal of an undogmatic individual with many selves within a self.

I Sing the Body Electric

The title of the poem deserves discussion for it brims with ambiguity.

What is electric – Is it the body of the human being, or the song that Whitman intends to sing? Which body is talked of here – that of a person, or that of the poem he sings in praise of the person? I have come to realise that answers to ambiguous questions, more often than not, are various – and all valid. That is what makes a poem so special – the words unsaid, and the seeming incompleteness that the poet bids us to complete with love and thought.

The text merges three entities: the poem, the body, and the soul. The poet devises a philosophy that emphasises their oneness and indivisibility. The exhortation of oneness of the body and the soul is more overt, while that of the poem and the body is expressed subtly.

The second stanza explicitly delineates the oneness of the body and the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

The first three sentences are rhetorical questions. The last line, with an appearance of similarity owing to the manner it begins, is different in nature and form – it is not a part of the triad that begins with “Was it doubted”; it is a separate question. This is not rhetorical as it may seem at first – this is a genuine inquiry. Is the soul something that transcends the body, or does it result from the existence of the body, and thus, ceases to be when the body dies?

Whitman structures his poem like a body, with nine sections, each working independently to generate a “movement”, as the human body does – the movement of the poem is that of ever-changing thought serving one goal: the celebration of the variegated human form.

Movement is the manifestation of the soul’s corporeal form. Essentially, movement is the soul. The bodily movements become the rhyme and rhythm of his poem, as manifested by the back and forth motion in the second section:

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle,

The rhythmic motion further serves to amplify the potential of human nature; that of a man or a woman to bear generations, the potential to reproduce.

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Whitman repeats himself. He is benign without the repetition, and the added meaning is of great significance. For instance the beginning of the second and the ninth section echo one another.

2

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

9

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,

The former section rejects the call for justification for the act of love towards any body. It is why contemporary readings make Whitman an egalitarian in romantic love. No-one knows what he believed in. Perhaps, he had to “stay in the closet”, for to live one's true self - as Whitman pioneered - the environment was hardly conducive in the nineteenth century. He thinks the body is faultless whatever the form – shape, size, colour, sex; the body itself balks account.

The latter set of lines mirror the former, like the hands of a body of nine parts. The soul-body-poem wholly synthesises here. If the love for the body and the body itself refuse to repent for their nature, “the likes of the body” - other human beings - and “the likes of the parts of the body” - the limbs, the neck, the waist, the thighs - also protest to subsist without any justification. They - the bodies and its parts - mean to exist unapologetically, however they may be.

Whitman’s style is lyrical, fluid, sinuous, tolerant, seamless and basks in the dearth of aplomb and jargon. The poem is the body and the soul; through his poem, the body and the soul become fluid. They become seamless and uncategorisable, for the reality is hardly binary, heteronormative and colourless.