Song of Myself

In this section of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”, he doesn’t use rhythm and hardly any rhyme. The only rhyming that he does, is with the word that he is rhyming with. For example the first two lines of the poem, “ I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume, you shall assume.” Also, Whitman does this again in the beginning of the fifth stanza, “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, the distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.” He repeated the words “Perfumes” and “It”. For literary devices, Whitman had imagery. He was very descriptive throughout the entire poem. Also, he had a simile on page 65, line 50, “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand.”, comparing himself and the mystery to the stout of a horse. The structure of the poem revolves around life and nature. Also, the structure seems to be made up of characters own stories and how they relate to nature. The tone and mood of the story are the same in this poem because they are both positive feelings about life and why it’s so great to be alive. Often times the narrator implies that the earth is great. However, at other times in the story, closer to the end the mood and tone change to being negative and sad because the baby died or the dead bodies of soldiers. Ultimately, i think that Walt Whitman is trying to show that life is too short and can be taken at any moment, so quickly and that they’re positive and negatives to life and there’s no way to control it, and that people should live their lives to the fullest because eventually everyone will die.