Walt Whitman Metaphor

Updike continues his portrayal of the vast splendor of nature through metaphors, similes, and diction pertaining to a large flock of starlings that flew and over and lit on the gold course where the two men in the poem are playing. The approaching flock of birds seem like a “cloud of dots” (Line 16) on the horizon to observers. The author compares The image of the steadily approaching flock of starlings to iron filings (the birds) stuck to a magnet through a piece of paper (the horizon). The men stand in awe of the black, writhing, approaching mass, much like children do when the magnet picks up the filings through the paper. By comparing the approaching birds to the magnet and iron filing scenario in a simile, Updike subtly likens the men reaction to a small child’s reaction when he/she sees the “magic” of the magnet and the iron filings for the first time. The simile purpose is to show how nature can make grown men feel like small, free little kids when experiencing nature at its best. As the observers continue to watch the looming flock of birds, the flock became one huge pulsating mass of birds that seemed as “much as one thing as a rock.” (Line 22) Updike once again eloquently portrays nature as absolutely stunning to show how nature affects man. The birds descended in a huge “evenly tinted” (Line

Construct a close reading of this poem that demonstrates your awareness of the poet’s body of work.

1. What do you notice about this poem? (where is the repetition...remember this from Module 2 on speeches). What is different about the free verse of this poem and the rhymed poems you studied in Module 4 with Edgar Allen Poe? When you write your own poems, do you use rhyme or free verse? What I have noticed about this poem is that Whitman continuously repeats the word “singing” as he introduces all of the people, based on their occupation, from all over “America”. Whitman and Poe write about completely different things. I think that choosing between writing in free verse and rhymed depends on the subject that you are writing about. I like writing in both.

The author uses imagery in the poem to enable the reader to see what the speaker sees. For example, in lines 4-11 the speaker describes to us the

The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.

Walt Whitman was an American poet whose writings are a major landmark in the history of American literature. A worldview is a system of beliefs and perspectives that inform and guides every decision we make. The worldview of Walt Whitman in his poem "O Me! O Life!" is that even when you feel useless and that all your aspirations are hopeless, you can still contribute a verse to the powerful play of

He explicitly seeks to unify all of these contrasts when, after the cataloguing first stanza in which he has mentioned so many objects, he explains, "There shall be no difference between them and the rest." Whitman perpetuates this idea in a much more fundamental and convincing way‹through his poetic rhetoric. Whitman's famous catalogues are the first step in creating this unity. By placing seemingly disparate things next to each other and by recognizing no difference other than that

Apart from that, the poem consists of a series of turns that reflect different parts of the speaker’s feelings and the experiences he had. The significance of these turns is made possible through the use of stanza breaks. For example, the first

These scholars, in their quest for excellence both revert back to simplicity. In both works children, and child-like thought are exalted. Emerson is awes at the freedom of a child, seeing it as god-like independence. He says a child conforms to no one, but rather all conform to the child. Whitman speaks of the wonder of a child contemplating what grass is.

As the speaker sits in an auditorium, they observe the lecturer’s many notes, “When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, / When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,” (lines 2-3). This line provides strong visual imagery of complex investigations in astronomy, and a reader can easily imagine a full lecture room with endless notes and charts which aids in providing the mind-numbing mood of the experience. Moreover, the repetitions of what are essentially synonyms in this context make these lines sound like the rambles of the astronomer, contributing to the tone. As the speaker tires of the lecture, he leaves the room and “In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars” (lines 8-9). Here Whitman again employs imagery to make the night seem appealing and

After first reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lyric poem, “If I Should Learn, in Some Quite Casual Way,” one may be taken aback by just how unconcerned the speaker, possibly Millay herself, seems to be with this scenario. Only after going back through the poem a time or two can one understand what Millay truly means. Figures of speech are methodically placed to give the impression that not much effort went into this mere thought.

The people in his poem are common folk without individual names, but in his celebratory verse they are all idealized. Each one finds joy in the dignity of his or her labor. In eleven lines of verse, the word "singing" appears eleven times, or twelve if you include the title. The word is used figuratively to reflect happy pride in performance of labor. This is a poem that voices American democracy. Its language is muscular, its pulse vibrant, its mood exultant. We will hear similar tonalities and exuberance in the free verse of Carl Sandburg, who was 14 when Whitman died.

The poem is also about mysterious of life, “The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids of mist, blind fish and old space suits with skeletons inside.”

The amount of syllables in the first half increases from 9, to 14, to 18, to 23. The steady syllable count increase is done intentionally to induce a sense of tension. This tension is needed to give a growing sense of urgency for the speaker to deny, and turn around and Whitman also put “When” at the beginning of each line of lines 1-4. Rigid flow gives a sense monotony, thus making the poem expectable and not in any way intriguing. The aforementioned case is a connection the speaker wants us to make through his repetition. To make us associate the mathematical explanation of the heavenly bodies with drudgery. The line “When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them...” is also a good example of that idea. The learn’d astronomer is making connections between mathematical concepts and great beauty

Along with the use of metaphors, the form of the poem plays an important role in uncovering the views of Whitman. First and foremost, this poem was written in free verse which is a form of poetry that lacks structure. The free verse stucture of the poem is shown in the lack of form in the stanzas of the poem. Some stanzas are six lines long while others are only one, and the lines can be either concise or drawn out. The poem also lacks any apparent rhyming scheme or rhythm. Unlike Shakespearean poetry, where the foot of the poem stays the same, the lack of any apparent structure to the poem leaves the reader unable to predict what is coming next. In addition to this, at the time this poem was written, free verse was not common. In fact, Whitman may have been one of the first poets to use this form, showing that he may have been rebelling against the predominant structured form in poetry. The lack of any apparent structure guides the reader towards the conclusion that Whitman did not like structure in poetry, and can even be