Whitman's View on Body and Soul 12/11/11

By Ginny Finch

"Embodied souls:" Both Dumbarton’s Advent theme and Walt Whitman’s poetic voice. To illustrate Whitman’s view of a unified body and soul, Marianne Noble, associate professor at American University, guided adult ed through five stanzas of Whitman’s Song of Myself. Here are some of her interpretations:
I  celebrate myself, and sing myself…
“We’re not intrinsically sinful. The notion of original sin is simply wrong.”

I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
“It doesn’t have to be such hard work to know God and to know ourselves.”

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
    All the argument of the earth.
“Whitman is using this language to talk about an orgasm.”

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own…
And that a keelson of the creation is love.
(A keelson is a keel-like part of a boat which holds other parts together.) “Love is the unifying force that brings things together…It’s arguably the most important line in all of Whitman.” 

For Walt Whitman, the body is the way we engage with the world and, through our senses, become part of it. “There is a distinction between the body and the soul, but they’re like two sides of a coin,” Noble explained. “The way to understand the soul is not in opposition to the body  but in the …things bodies do.”