3:38-5:20

Two things that I have to talk about: the ambiguity of poetry and section 6 of Song of Myself.

I have never been much of an interpreter, or at least thought of myself as one who is good at interpreting. When I was in elementary school, I thought I really liked poetry because of its sing-song-y rhythm and rhyming words. But then I went to middle school and then high school, and poetry just got more and more confusing and I stopped being able to understand them because they weren’t those short and simple and straightforward lines about liking cats and hating bats or something like that. Poems became something too complex for my brain to wrap around. Sure I could read them, but I definitely couldn’t understand them because it really just sounded like random words put together to me. Other students would be able to pull analyses of single lines or whole stanzas out of thin air, it seemed, and I was just stuck in a fog of confusion. When I read interpretations of poems though, they make much more sense. For Song of Myself, I read two interpretations: one from Sparknotes and one from Shmoop, both having been reliable sources for book summaries in the past. It was then that I realized poems could be interpreted differently depending on who is doing the interpreting (duh!). The Sparknotes interpretation talked about how Whitman was describing the self in relation to everything around it, and the Shmoop interpretation talked about how egotistical the speaker of the poem was. Now, there’s no right or wrong interpretation, unless you can ask the author himself, but I like the Sparknotes one better because it’s more positive.

I’m not much of a philosophical thinker but I like the idea of a connection of the self to its environment, which leads me into the content of the actual video. Nick Courtright talks about Section 6 of Song of Myself — the one where a boy asks Whitman, “what is the grass?” Everyone lives and dies; everyone is part of the same entity; everyone is one. Everyone lived and ate from the earth and eventually returns to the earth when they die which feeds the things that grow in the grass which feed animals and humans which die and are buried again — a continuous cycle. Courtright says, “even when you die, there is still a long future ahead of you.” So death is short lived, as you will become a part of life again, and this is why Whitman says, “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Death is not as bad as it seems because you will live again. If you think about it, we are made of the same atoms that were on this earth millions of years ago, and these atoms are just being recycled every time something decays. Humans are recyclable…?