![]() ![]() In this section, he sings a wondrous catalog of “the spread of my own body,” in which he evokes his sexual organs in terms of nature itself, as the natural world and the entire universe seem to be an endless set of metaphors for sexuality, desire, and the urge for procreation-from the phallic “timorous pond-snipe” with its long neck and bill, rising from its nest of “duplicate eggs,” to the “libidinous prongs” that seem to penetrate the heavens and release “seas of bright juice” in the form of constellations and nebulae. ![]() He emphasizes his materiality, his body that eats and drinks and breeds, carrying on from previous sections his insistence that soul and voice exist only when embodied, when given mass. ![]() And the name comes with an immediate emphasis on its local and universal connections-Walt Whitman is the “son” of New York but is in fact, like all of us, a “kosmos,” a self harmonious with the vast universe of which he knows he is an eternal part. The effect is that this nameless voice-this “I”-that has absorbed so much in the first twenty-three sections, can now take on an actual identity, since it has accumulated a sensory past. For readers of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), where Whitman’s name did not appear on the cover or title page, this would have been the first indication of the who the author was. Now, twenty-four sections into “Song of Myself,” Whitman finally introduces himself by name. ![]()
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