Close Reading of Leaves of Grass Poem 2-12-18

Whitman uses sentences of varying lengths, though a majority of the time the sentences tend to be short. Alongside short sentences, Whitman uses repetition of certain key words to identify variables such as setting, the mood of the story and the time events took place in. These two go hand in hand to immerse the reader and deeply instill the imagery of the poem in them; the short sentences serve as easy to digest and meaningful pieces of a bigger puzzle, while the repetition reminds the reader what ideas to focus on, or question why those words were used in particular. Personally, I see an astoundingly wide array of similarities to Open City, the main one being that the narrator, much like Julius, is wandering; not really traveling with a purpose but not exactly wandering aimlessly either. In both the stories there exists a faint idea of what general place the characters want to or are supposed to be in, and the stories follow the journey the characters take to get there rather than where they’re going.

Edit: Forgot the Close Reading Portion! Here goes:

Upon doing a close reading of the 4th section of the poem, it occurred to me that the author holds the city and the people in it close to him, he regards the vast exchange of diversity among the people as a part of himself, stating that “The men and women that I saw were all near to me-“, showing he was close to them, whether literally or metaphorically. What’s more, the last sentence clues us in on how he looks up to them, or forward, because they look back on him. This hints that even though the two may be people from very different lives, underneath the status and standing, both the narrator and the people around him are just that; people.