Whitman, from "Songs of Myself": Boundaries of the Identity

Whitman's epic poem is rife with contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes. It is a constant struggle between which part of identity is inherent and which part comes from the outside influences. Which perspectives are your own and which are imposed on you from this world outside of your own thought?

In part 4 of "Songs of Myself", he lists rapidly events that are considered to have an impact on a person:"discoveries, inventions, societies" or "the sickness of one of my folk" and he determines that these events are detached from him, "they are not the Me myself." He brings up all of the life events, small and large that seemingly impact one's person and yet he is separate from him. "These come to [him] day and night and go from [him] again." They are too fleeting for him to harness to be apart of him; he cannot integrate these events into himself. He is impartial. There is a sense of this "in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it"but there is no integration of his thought and his self with the impact of scientific discoveries, unrequited love, and horrific battles (of the Civil War).The world enters him and he enters the world but there is no mutual interaction, he is complacent.  He is submerged, yet separate, like a biological entity with a highly selective cell wall that processes all of the information that comes to it but turns most alien subject out. It is almost an inhuman, mechanical way of living. There is no emotion to this described-self that has "no mocking or arguments, witness[ing] and wait[ing]." It leaves one wanting emotion, a response, something human to grasp onto.

In part 16 of "Songs of Myself", there is more of an acceptance of influence of the material  world on identity. There is a focus especially on the identity as an American, and as he lived through the Civil War, there is a start on the association of being both a Southerner and a Northerner. He is at home as a "Yankee," as a "Kentuckian," Louisianian," or "Georgian", as a "Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye", or in Vermont, Maine, Texas, or California. He hits every region of the U.S. He is at home everywhere and yet I feel as if he is at home no-where. He belongs everywhere and is everything and yet he lacks an identity. There is no way to pin his sense-of-self down and so he just floats away in this immense diversity. He also is of every profession and categorization of a person, "a farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor,  quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest." It is an impossibility as we think it to be all of these things at once and this paradox is to illuminate the problems of categorization. A human cannot be labeled and stereotyped. Labels and imposed-identities are over-whelming, leading to a crisis, as he demonstrates, where a sense of self is lost amongst the lists of labels.  But at the end is where there is a sense of positivity comes in when he accepts the diversity, but without labels, this idea that "everything is in its place," including himself. There is a sense of acceptance with the unknown, a comfort. "The bright suns [he] see[s] and the dark sun[s] [he] cannot see are in their place" and also "the palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place." The things he knows and the things he cannot know, that are out of his range are all where they belong, even the contradictions in self and the inconsistencies are accepted, but not in a Candide-esque way, he is more explorative than Candide, who accepts things as they are given to him. As he made clear in section 4, Whitman does not accept all things through his cell walls, he is a very selective creature, he came to this notion of things being in their place through his own exploration.

William Blake,The Little Black Boy-- A Note in Black and White

The narrator of this poem, "a little black boy", knows clearly the different connotations between the society's view on black skin color and white skin color but he also has an insight into the transcendent equality of humanity. The little black boy differentiates the distinctness between black and white. His skin is black, "as if bereaved of light" and his soul is white "as an angel is the English child." It is a paradox in his acceptance of white being the color of light and superiority but also is non-acceptance to his skin color being his only defining trait. As he says, "my soul is white" and therefore as a person, as a soul, he is not lacking light and he is therefore innocent, only on the outer facade is he dark. He accepts that his facade may appear dark because it is what allows his inside to be pure white.

It is a bit of a paradox because this darkness is what allows his inside to be light. "And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud" that will shade him from the directness of God's heat and allow him to absorb this other-worldly knowledge better than the English man with his white and un-shaded skin. It is as if the black man has this gift that on Earth-- his skin color-- that allows him to be less ignorant than the white man because he has a better understanding of this transcendental world, the knowledge coming in from God in this extreme light form. The white man is too ignorant to capture much of this extreme light from God; the white man is ignorant not only to the transcendental knowledge but also to the black man's worth. It is paradoxical again in the sense that Blake acknowledges the inherent "goodness" in the color white and yet he still does not ascribe any overwhelmingly good qualities to the white man other than his coloring.

But in the Christian ascent to heaven, "the cloud will vanish" and there will be no differentiation between skin colors and the lack of light in the black boy's skin will be cleared like rays of sunshine coming through a cloud. This is where Blake's egalitarian ideas become more apparent because when a the black boy realizes that in God's transcendental world, "when i from the black and he from the white cloud free," they both become on equal and realizable terms. In the material world they are unable to truly realize their equality because it is a knowledge only of the intangible world. Blake is making a commentary that humans are equal in the heavenly world and also in the material world, but it is impossible for the white man to realize this equality in the material world because they do not have the dark skin to absorb pieces of this knowledge from the transcendental world, only the black man has this help.  Humans can only truly realize their equality after they have transcended to the immaterial world and have been stripped of these "clouds of color."

The last stanza of this poem has what seems like and what has been critiqued as racism in the "and be like him and he will then love me." The "him" and the "he" are not quite clear if Blake is referring to God or to white man but I believe that the "him" and "he" refer to the white man because in Christianity and in this poem God is portrayed as loving all and "giv[ing] his light and giv[ing] his heat away" to all creatures of the earth, so it would seem contradictory to have the black man have to earn God's love. It seems more plausible that it is a commentary by Blake on the white man's lack of love for the black man  in the material world but his realization in the immaterial world, with the help of the "shade from the heat" from the black man, that all humans are equal. the black man helps the white man learn and the white man loves him not only for his help but also for the lesson that the black man helped him realize that all humans are equal in God's world. It isn't so much a racist comment, as some people have critiqued Blake but more a criticism of the white man's inability to love the black man in the material world.