"Spontaneous Me" Analysis

Amanda Onalaja

September 16, 2009

Pd. 2 – Ms. Brown

“Spontaneous Me” can very well be described as a list of random subjects. The poet, Walt Whitman embodies randomness and spontaneity, or so one may think. The first line repeats the title and the topic, Nature. While the poem appears impulsive, the images Whitman expresses do have a common link with nature. The importance of his “list style” is the requirement to infer the poems overall relationship with its topic – How is Whitman connecting these different events? Not to mention his purpose for comparing them. In “Spontaneous Me” Whitman appeals to pathos with his uses of refined imagery. He discusses Nature and it’s relation to humanity or rather humans and their relation with Nature.

What readers may not realize is that Whitman mixes human nature and non-human nature in this poem. “…The friend I am happy with, the arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder” and “Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other” are examples of the human nature Whitman expresses. Each quote depicts a natural instinct of love in humans. The non-human side is displayed through everyday nature, “…hillside whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash” and “The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds”. All of the examples given are characteristics of nature in some form.

However, Whitman indulges in the human side of nature in a more sensual way – the nature of sexual desire. “The hairy wild-bee… that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied” that passage radiates sexuality, but in a sense it still is a metaphor for nature by human and non-human standards. “Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers”, the word “love” is repetitiously used to emphasis a sexual connection with many things, although “love” may not be the same as “sexual desire”, like Whitman is talking about.

Overall, I believe the poet is using nature to bury his true gist of the poem. He practically announces the significance of the poem in the eighth and ninth lines, “The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures)/ The poems of the privacy of the night”, he speaks of something obviously sexual. Whitman is trying to say he believes sexual desire is natural. “The poems” he speak of are phallic, “This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry, (…our lusty lurking masculine poems)”. Whitman intertwines the body, love, and passion together to get poetry. “The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body”, “the young man all color’d, red, ashamed, angry”, and “the young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that flushes and flushes”, are all examples of natural sexual instincts.

Whitman embraces the nature of his manhood and is unashamed. He feels there is a “great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity” and will not be afraid to express his desires as a human. He also appeals to ethos and gives biblical credit when he writes, “The oath of procreation, I have sworn, my Adamic… [I] shall produce boys to fill my place when I am through”, reminding readers he is a descendant of biblical character Adam and therefore must recognize his duties (producing offspring or not) as a man.