Meanwhile, Whitman-while he was alive and embodied-discovered he could “drift” himself into the “lacy jags” of print (in another poem, Whitman called printed words “those upright lines,” “those curves, angles, dots”), leaving behind this poem, with its curled and jagged letters forming words, forming ideas, forming images.

As the body decomposes, the self dissipates along with it, all its memories and ideas and thoughts effusing and departing like the materials of the body that gave the self identity: our sights and hearings and touches all vaporize back into the things that generated those sights and sounds and touch-effusing, pouring out, into the world from which they derived, released from the eyes and ears and brain and fingertips, from the bodily network of nerves (what Whitman elsewhere calls “the body electric”) that gives us what we experience as “identity.” The poet seems to be taunting future translators, like all of those represented here on the WhitmanWeb, who quickly discover the impossibility of moving into another language the vast and intricate web of images and words that is “Song of Myself.” But when Whitman says “I too am untranslatable,” he is also thinking about how the “I,” the self, is finally not translatable from one set of materials to another (“translate,” in its roots, means to carry over from one state to another). (Where, after all, does our body come from? It is, the poet reminds us here once again, a continually changing organization of materials from the far reaches of the earth, from the far reaches of the cosmos.) So we experience one final Whitmanian catalog, as “I” cascades down the left margin of the page, each time dissolving into the “untranslatable” materials of the world-the air, the sun, the eddies, the “jags,” the dirt, the grass, and finally the “you” that the poem leaves us with.Īs “untranslatable” as the hawk’s cry, Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” leaves us with an echo in the air, with a fading twilight, and with grass under our feet.

He is part hawk, yawping his untranslatable yawp “over the roofs of the world” he is part of the quickly passing clouds (the “scud”), part of the shadows-part of our very bodies, filtering and giving fiber to our blood. So, here at the end, how does the poet extract himself from this poem that we have been immersed in for hours, days, months, years? How does Whitman say goodbye? As we might expect, he pulls off one of the great disappearing acts in all of literature: he begins, before our eyes, to “depart as air,” to be coaxed “to the vapor and the dusk,” to “effuse” his flesh “in eddies,” and generally to dissipate into the landscape, where we will find him nowhere and everywhere, growing from the grass he loves, composted into the dirt beneath our “boot-soles.” Every atom belonging to him now as well belongs to us and to the living world around us.

Song of myself 1855