Specimen Days: Home-Made Music

"And there sweetly rose those voices up to the high, whitewash'd wooden roof, and pleasantly the roof sent it all back again."


Whitman conveys the motions of inward and outward within this simple log of a choir of nurses. It is like the breath of the voices brings security or.. relief in the patrons watching the performance by moving through them. I don't think he finds it coincidence that one of the soldiers he was watching, that was severely injured, happened to feel at ease that night. Maybe this outlook or mood wasn't true for the setting, but Whitman's perceptions of the night seem to relay similar ideas of appreciation, seen in Song of Myself.

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me...I dab with bare feet...they are licked by the indolent waves,
I am exposed...cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine...my windpipe squeezed in the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzles of puzzles,
And that we call Being.


When speaking of the opera within the poem Song of Myself, Whitman describes his body as convulsing, throbbing, sailing, steeping, squeezing, whirling... all because of this inward movement from the voices. It portrays the up and down heaving, continuous motion. At the end of the verse he defines this motion as "that we call Being." I think he finds some sort of liveliness, not actual living things but what keeps us living, within certain moments like this... or maybe in every moment. Something that is always present that he is able to appreciate, that keeps us continuously moving up and down, back and forward, in and out... Maybe it is brought out the most by the vibrations of the voice. Maybe he believes we are most human and alive when we express the vibrations of the body, or act through our bodies and not our minds. It almost seems to reflect some sort of religious belief of some sort of constant presence like God, but... it's more than that. The feeling of almost death or fake death.. like morphine.. seems to be the highest form of pleasure here. Maybe we are the most alive when we feel as if we're dying.