Song Of Myself Analysis

Words: 537
Pages: 3

For my project I wrote a poem that was inspired by Walt Whitman’s, “Song of Myself”. It used similar connections to nature and ideas about death. In both Whitman and mine, a big overlying idea is that death is natural, inevitable, and that it is not an end but a cycle that has existed before the life of an individual and will continue to go on long after they have gone. The transcendentalist principle that I connect with the most is idea of seeking truth through “solitude, reflection, and self-examination”. Whitman’s poem and my poem both show how a modern audience would benefit by describing how being close to nature would benefit them. One of the main points of it is to describe how nature shows people who they are, and that no matter what …show more content…
I used anadiplosis and a metaphor when I was comparing how nature works together similarly to any being that exists under its domain. It started by writing how the stream is the lifeblood to the forest/plants, then they in turn nourish and foster life, which allows other life to also live there. Another metaphor I used was that nature was a source of fire and everything that comes from it, carries its own wick for the extent of its existence, and the farther that one strays from it the more they lose of themselves. The fire represents life, souls, and mortality; while its counterpart the shadows represent the fight to defeat the inevitable and the progression of civilization. Also people rely heavily on fire/heat so it can also be seen as the further people descend into overcoming the limits of nature, the more they not only their identity, but also of nature. Leaving a “fire” unattended leaves the individual cold and the fire to die then eventually the individual may follow suit. Then again Smokey the bear may disagree and mutter something about forest fires, but either way same result. I unintentionally used a pun in the title, I started with immortality, stole a noun from the first and last lines, and then realized how oxymoronic it was to use immortality in the same line as words than inadvertently dig up images of