Whitman leaving his readers with hope

After reading the poems “Out of May’s Shows Selected,” “Going Somewhere,” and “Continuities,” I was surprised at the incredibly hopefully and optimistic outlook the late Whitman left for his readers. Although through our weeks in class Whitman has almost always proven to be a forward looking poet, after last weeks civil war poems describing the true atrocities Whitman faced as a nurse, I assumed Whitman’s final days of poetry would be on the dimmer side. However, with these three poems brought me a sense of happiness that I actually had not yet felt for any of Whitman’s poetry thus far.

The first poem I read for this week was “Continuities” which actually helped me grasp the other two poems I mention in this post. Although in many instances continuities can be negative aspects of life (such as racial violence in our country’s history), Whitman takes the idea of things constantly repeating and never ending and turns them into a positive outlook on life. Whitman’s poem essentially explains how even when we think things have been lost forever, eventually everything (light, fire, birth) will come back to life again. One of the other notions Whitman stresses in this poem as well as in “Out of May’s Shows Selected” is the sun always rising. In “Continuities” he says, “The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual.” Similarly in “Out of May’s Shows Selected” Whitman writes, “The external, exhaustless freshness of each morning.” No matter what disturbing things may happen, Whitman reminds us that a new day will always come full of possibilities.

In the last poem I want to look at, “Going Somewhere”, Whitman sticks with this theme of continual hopefulness. This poem emphasizes once again how time is always moving forward. One of my favorite lines in this poem comes when Whitman says, “Is that we all are onward, onward speeding slowly, surely bettering.” Not only does Whitman leave readers with a sense of life always continuing, but that as this life continues, we as human beings are growing and always bettering ourselves because of it.

One Response to Whitman leaving his readers with hope

  1. Prof VZ March 12, 2016 at 4:00 pm #

    Great attention to these uplifting final poems, though I did enjoy our conversation in class about how they can also be viewed as somewhat estranging, as thought Whitman was placing distance between himself and these more optimistic utterances by using quotes, by framing the poems as conversations, and so on. I think that optimism is there–it’s just filtered in really interesting ways.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

Skip to toolbar