Walt Whitman’s writing has captured readers around the world, both by content and style. His language is accessible to readers of many backgrounds and reading levels. Whitman’s use of simple words and clear prose are contributors to this readability, but other elements add to the accessibility of his work, including repetition. Whitman uses repetition in “Song of Myself” to increasingly complex effect, constructing a work which is nuanced in its use of repeating words and phrases.
Whitman uses repetition to convey sameness in his poem. He begins at the second line of the poem, “And what I assume you shall assume,” (1:2) where he uses “assume” twice in succession to build similarity in the two consecutive phrases of “what I assume” and “[that] you shall assume.” The parallelism creates an equality between the two halves of the line, suggesting that the assumption of Whitman and the assumption of the reader are the same.
Whitman continues to use repetition as a sign of sameness through the rest of the poem. For example, in section 7 he uses a series of lines which all begin with “For me” (7:131-135) to introduce a list of people. The continuing pattern of lines which all begin with the two words “For me” creates cohesion, gathering the types of people together and making them the same. Whitman starts and continues to use repetition to indicate sameness, beginning early in the poem.
After he has established repetition as a signifier of equality, Whitman uses repetition to bring different things together into a sameness. For instance, he writes, “The moth and the fisheggs are in their place, The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.” (16:350-353). These three lines bring increasingly broad and distinct things into a cohesion.
The first line of the trio is, “The moth and the fisheggs are in their place.” This combines two things which are somewhat distinct, but not dissimilar. Moths and fisheggs are both animals, though they are in different stages of life and from different families.
The following line, “The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,” uses repeating phrasing around a coordinating conjunction. On either side of the “and” is the phrase “the suns I see” with the second iteration adding a “cannot” to distinguish it from the first. This construction adjoins and equates the two mutually exclusive groups of suns which Whitman sees, and the suns he cannot see. He makes them equal in both being in their places, just as he did the moths and fisheggs of the line preceding.
Finally, Whitman writes, “The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.” which brings together the entirety of “the palpable” and all that is “impalpable.” Whitman again uses identical constructions with a coordinating conjunction to balance and equate them. However, where the phrase before has subject phrases gathered before a singular verb phrase, this final line uses two independent clauses which are different only in the addition of an “im” to the subject of the second clause. This is significant precisely because where moths and fish eggs are similar in being both living things, and different suns are still all suns, the palpable and impalpable are fundamentally distinct by nature. One can be observed, and one cannot. Whitman, then, uses the most repetitive construction in this line, bringing the most different subjects to sameness with the most forceful repetition.
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” uses repetition to convey increasingly complex meaning, building the reader’s understanding of complicated ideas by the recurring motif of repetition. This is one way in which Walt Whitman creates accessible and understandable work.