I liked this video because I resonated with his points. In the video, (00:59) John Doherty, a construction worker thought poetry was intimidating initially. He thought a lot of words and a lot of order “which did not belong together and that is challenge of it”. However, when we finished reading the long word, we felt so good.
“Song of myself” is a poem by Walt Whitman that is included in his work Leaves of Grass. The first published book for Whitman was the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. After that, he kept revising and adding to this book throughout his life. John said he could not understand when he first time read the poem, but once he did, once him came to understand, he felt like he has achieved something.
Before Whitman became a published poet, he was a schoolteacher and a journalist. He did not go to the top school and he let himself writing by immerse himself in Shakespeare and other classics.
In the poem section 13, Whitman wrote “Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
I believe in those wing’d purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.”
Here, Whitman saw more meaning in the eyes of an ox than in all the books he has ever read. and he claimed that studying nature is more important than studying books or philosophy. John in the video said “those lines it is so encouraging. Whitman tells you what you’re thinking, and it seems like speaking directly to I when I read it. Those lines in mind no matter what I read now”. The connection we felt with the poem, for John was not due to the fact that Whitman talked about laborers or physical laborers working outside. It told us see things in life and in everyday existence that you hadn’t noticed. For the students, I might be learning the knowledge from the text book but I could not learn everything I needed to know from book. Whitman also told me the new way to get more was learning from life. I needed to discover things for myself through participating in the daily life, enjoying the moment and getting the higher experience. All of the experience I might have taken it for granted before.