(Poetry speaks differently to every person who interacts
with it. I don't believe there is ever only one way to interpret poetry. This is how
section 7 speaks to me.)
In section 7 of "Song to Myself,"
the speaker (not necessarily Whitman) simply asks if people know that it as lucky to be
born as it is to die. How he knows this he does not say, but he does speak in the
"collective," rather than as an individual--as a part of the whole, a very
transcendentalist view.
Still speaking in the collective
sense, he defies the confines of skin, the body, to say that he passes death and birth,
but he cannot be contained between his hat and boots. He is part of the world around
him: life at its end and its beginning.
From an
universalist standpoint, the speaker looks at all the things in the world; he recognizes
that no two are the same, but that each is good, as are the earth and stars, and all
heavenly objects.
The speaker notes that he is not the
earth or another planet, but connected, a companion, to all people;
and all those people are as immortal and fathomless (hard to understand) as he is,
though only he knows just how immortal they are. (He still does not indicate how he
knows.)
Everything is connected to all things related to
it: the speaker is a person, so he is connected to all humans, which include men and
women; anyone who has been a boy and loved a woman; every man who is proud but has been
hurt by insult; the woman who loves and the woman who never marries; mothers and their
mothers. He feels akin to anyone whose lips have smiled or eyes have cried, as well as
children and those who have had children. In other words, he feels a connection with
all people, for every kind of person seems to fit into at least one of these
categories.
Our speaker talks to everyone, saying, "Do not
hide from me, for I see no guilt in you, nothing to reproach. You are fresh, like new,
and not to be dismissed or brushed aside as if valueless. I see through the disguise,
the coverings, and I know what is true.
"I am around,
determined, grasping, tireless; and I cannot be dismissed or pushed away: I am a part
of the whole of humanity. We are all part of the whole."
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