In this section, Whitman breaks out of enclosures, whether they be physical enclosures or mental ones. In one of his early notebooks, Whitman had drafted the line “Literature is full of perfumes,” a recognition that books and philosophies and religions all offer filtered versions of how to view the world. They are all “intoxicating”—alluring, to be sure, but also toxic. We are always tempted to live our lives according to the views of those who came before us, but Whitman urges us to escape such enclosures, open up the senses fully, and breathe the undistilled atmosphere itself. It is in this literal act of breathing that we gain our “inspiration,” the actual breathing in of the world. In this section, Whitman records the physicality of singing, of speaking a poem: a poem, he reminds us, does not derive from the mind or the soul but from the body. Our inspiration comes from our respiration, and the poem is “the smoke of my own breath,” the breathing of the atoms of the air back out into the world again as song. Poems are written, Whitman indicates here, with the lungs and the heart and the hands and the genitals—with the air oxygenating our blood in the lungs and pumping it to our brain and every part of our body. We write (just as we read) with our bodies as much as our minds.
The poet in this section allows the world to be in naked contact with him, until he can feel at one with what before had been separate—the roots and vines now seem part of the same erotic flow that he feels in his own naked body (“love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine”), and he is aware of contact and exchange, as he breathes the world in only to breathe it back again as an undistilled poem. All the senses are evoked here—smell (“sniff of green leaves”), hearing (“The sound of the belch’d words of my voice”), touch (“A few light kisses”), sight (“The play of shine and shade”), taste (“The smoke of my own breath,” that “smoke” the sign of a newly found fire within).
Now Whitman gently mocks those who feel they have mastered the arts of reading and interpretation. As we read this poem, Whitman wonders if we have “felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems,” and he invites us now to spend a “day and night” with him as we read “Song of Myself,” a poem that does not hide its meanings and require occult hermeneutics to understand it. Rather, he offers up his poem as one that emerges from the undistilled and unfiltered sources of nature, the words “belch’d” (uttered, cried out, violently ejected, bellowed) instead of manicured and shaped. This is a poem, Whitman suggests, that does not want to become a guide or a “creed,” but one that wants to make you experience the world with your own eyes. We take in this poet’s words, and then “filter them” from our selves, just like we do with the atmosphere and all the floating, mingling atoms of the world.
–EF
Can you please mark as brainliest?
