5/9/2023 0 Comments Song of myself poem![]() We look into the poet’s “face” by looking onto the “face” of the page itself. So Whitman reminds us of our relationship to the book as he exclaims, “Listener up there!” It’s as if the poet, now embodied in the ink and paper, is speaking to us off the page, looking up at us as we peer down at the book. ![]() ![]() ![]() In a later poem called “Unfolded Out of the Folds,” Whitman imagined all of life as a series of unfoldings, just as every new life and identity is “unfolded” out of “the folds of the woman.” Each and every moment is a new birth, a new world of Now unfolding before the awake senses of all those who are embodied in that moment.Īs we read Whitman’s book, we are also aware of the “folds” of the pages, and, as we read each one and fold it over to confront the next, we are enacting in the process of reading the continual, literal unfolding of new moments, new ideas, new encounters, new sections of the poem. The moment of “Now” incessantly empties the past and present in order to open a new “fold of the future,” which becomes the ever-emerging moment of presence. ![]() Some of Whitman’s most beautiful lines are here, as when he images the “past and present” as wilted plants, once alive and sentient but now withered and emptied of presence, of life. This section contains Whitman’s plea to the reader to begin the work of responding to what the poet has proposed-to begin to argue, to talk, to co-create the poem. ![]()
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