Spontaneous Me :Walt Whitman (Explication)

This poem, “Spontaneous Me”, written by Walt Whitman describes the beauty of both nature and the human body. By writing this poem, he most probably wanted to show the connection between these two. When reading it, a person can see that the entire poem is a connection between love, sexual passion and the human body. Why does he do so? By analyzing the poem I realized he believes that the real poem is inside the man himself, and everything around us is part of poetry, which when connected; make an excellent poetry, full of imagination and life!    The structure of the poem says it all! He uses anaphora, using mostly “the” to make some sort of connection between the lines, to enable the creation of large audio and visual images and give rhythm and tonality to the text. Each line has separate ideas and images, but they are all tied together by common beginnings. By doing so, he has managed to connect all the different lines and the ideas and make them parts of a theme. In this poem, Whitman has used free verses, which has helped him sound the poem like an ongoing story, which is infinite and has no particular end.    When reading, you can see that the poem includes lots of non-poetic things; being animals or plants/parts of nature, and resembling them to the human being, thus, making them poetic and full of life. In the above mentioned passage, he compares man to a hairy wild-bee that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs. Every single image in this line is sexual and natural. In my opinion, it describes the process of the sexual intercourse in humans. “Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers…”, as you can see, Whitman has repeatedly used the word “love”, to emphasize a sexual connection with different things, and to show the connection between love and sex. The main idea of the poem is shown in the first line: Spontaneous me, Nature. He has done so to show from the beginning that the free, uninhibited sexual passion within man is indeed natural. Whitman points out two aspects of nature. The human aspect, which is shown in “the arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder” and in “two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep”. The non-human aspect is represented in the “hillside whiten’d with blossoms”, “the hairy wild-bee”, “the wet of woods”, and “dead leaf”. Whitman includes all the senses of man, being emotional or touchable, however he emphasizes mostly on the sense of touch.