Analyzing Whitman's Song Of Myself

While Whitman departs from the emotional side of death and celebrates mortality’s renewable nature, Dickinson looks at all aspects of death to show that dying and watching loved ones die is anguishing, yet some relief may be found.

Throughout the poem, Song of Myself, Whitman shows that there is no need to fear death. He celebrates it by seeing the beauty in one person’s body decay actually becoming part of the larger world: “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and/the end,/But I do not talk of the beginning or the end” (Whitman 37-9). By separating the phrase “the end”, he links a believed permanent end destination at death to various religions’ forms of an afterlife. Whitman argues this notion is misguided and causes needless

He states there is “Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” (Whitman 43). Whitman encourages his audience to return back to our natural selves, unadulterated by society’s fears, and to become once more apart of Nature. This unorthodox opinion is shown throughout Canto 32, when he intensively describes various animals with admiration, and marvels that, “They do not sweat and whine about their condition,/They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins” (Whitman 686-7). Unlike humans who constantly complain or panic about the inescapable end to their current existence, animals are not concerned with dying or what will happen after death . Whitman goes as far to directly confront a personified figure of mortality, stating: “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to/alarm me” (Whitman 1288-1289). Instead of traditional belief that human life is finite, Whitman follows the transcendentalist idea that existence is one cycle composed of life, death, and rebirth, where he is “of one phase and of all phases.”(Whitman 458). Due to life being a perpetual, death is therefore only a stage. Whitman uses the