There Was A Child That Went Forth, By Walt Whitman

I, often, think that we do not realize how much places and people impact the lives we lead. We do not realize that our sense of place in this world and who we are is created by the experiences we have with people, places, and objects we have encountered throughout our journey Walt Whitman is trying to convey this message in this poem “There was a Child that went forth”. His poem is created up of a long list of objects and people that the child meets along his path of life that ultimately shape who the child will become. If we look deeper into Whitman’s poem we can see that these objects and people the child meets help him find his sense of place. Everything we experience in our life, whether big or small, helps us locate our sense of place.

For Whitman, a sense of place is made up of more than a physical, geographical location. Instead it is made up of people, objects, places, and even intangible things. This connected with my own sense of place. For example, Whitman says “the early lilacs became part of this child / and grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird” (4-5). With these words, Whitman is showing us that our encounters with nature can shape our sense of place. Towards the end of his poem, Whitman says “the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud” (38). Whitman shows us here that sometimes our sense of place can be made up of intangible things that we cannot touch. Instead the simple presence of them helps to form our sense of