I Sing the Body Electric

“I Sing the Body Electric” was originally an untitled poem in Walt Whitman’s self-published poetry collection Leaves of Grass in 1855. This book was controversial at the time it was written, obliging Whitman to publish the volume on his own. He also revised the book several times throughout his life, adding more pieces and changing poem titles in subsequent editions. Whitman is widely acknowledged as being the father of American poetry because of his style of unrhymed, free-verse poems and his glorification of common people. “I Sing the Body Electric” exalts the body of all people, particularly ordinary Americans who were farming, building, and creating the relatively new nation. It also glorifies the bodies of enslaved people, noting their bodies are the same as free people, thus taking an anti-slavery position. The poem is less well-known than some of Whitman’s other poems, in part because the focus on the body and homoerotic insinuations make certain critics uncomfortable, yet the title of the poem is well known—including frequent musical adaptations. Like many of Whitman’s poems, the elegant phrase of this poem’s title has made its way into popular culture.

Poet Biography

Walter Whitman was born to Walter Whitman Sr. and Louisa Van Velsor on May 31, 1819. One of nine children, he grew up in Long Island until his father moved the family to Brooklyn, where Whitman attended school. Whitman’s father was a carpenter who built cheap houses, but he did not do well in business and the family struggled. When he was 12, the young Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and worked in that industry until the age of 17. During this time, he fell in love with literature, reading Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, and the Bible.

Whitman began teaching in Long Island at age 17, but after five years, he returned to journalism to edit The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Eventually, The Eagle dismissed him because he supported the growing anti-slavery movement. In 1848, he went to New Orleans to edit The Crescent, where he witnessed the auctioning of enslaved people. That horror propelled him to return north, where he co-founded the newspaper Brooklyn Freeman.

In 1855, Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which he would continue to expand upon and revise until his death. The collection received good reviews from transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it was also controversial for its frank depiction of sensuality. Later, a Boston publisher would take the revised book under its umbrella, but that publisher then went bankrupt during the Civil War.

During the Civil War, Whitman went back to freelance journalism, reporting on the hospitals of New York City until his brother was wounded at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Whitman moved to the area near Washington, DC, to visit his brother and other soldiers, bringing gifts to both Union and Confederate wounded alike and reporting on what he saw. In 1865, Drum-Taps was published, a collection of war poems containing some of Whitman’s poetry. This introduced readers to Whitman’s new style of free-verse poetry. The poems in Drum-Taps later appeared in Whitman’s later editions of Leaves of Grass.

After 11 years in the Washington, DC, area, Whitman became a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, found out that Whitman had written Leaves of Grass, Harlan fired him.

In 1873, Whitman had a stroke. Soon after he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his mother was dying. He stayed with his brother, until he eventually bought a house of his own with the proceeds from Leaves of Grass. In his final years, he revised Leaves of Grass and compiled his second book, Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). He died on March 26, 1892.

Poem Text

1

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

2

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,

That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

The expression of the face balks account,

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,

And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water,

The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle,

Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,

The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,

The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,

The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd,

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work,

The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,

The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,

The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,

The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting;

Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child,

Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

3

I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,

And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,

The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners,

These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,

He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,

They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,

They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,

He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face,

He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,

When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,

You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

4

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,

All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

5

This is the female form,

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,

It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,

Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,

Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,

Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,

Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,

Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,

Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

This the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,

This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,

You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The female contains all qualities and tempers them,

She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,

She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active,

She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature,

As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,

See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

6

The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,

He too is all qualities, he is action and power,

The flush of the known universe is in him,

Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well,

The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him,

The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,

Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself,

Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here,

(Where else does he strike soundings except here?)

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,

No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang?

Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?

Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,

Each has his or her place in the procession.

(All is a procession,

The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?

Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight?

Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,

For you only, and not for him and her?

7

A man’s body at auction,

(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)

I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder,

Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,

For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,

For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain,

In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,

They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,

The same old blood! the same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,

(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?

(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?)

8

A woman’s body at auction,

She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,

She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?

Have you ever loved the body of a man?

Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,

And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,

And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.

Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?

For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

9

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)

I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,

Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,

Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,

Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,

Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,

Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,

Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,

Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,

Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,

Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,

Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,

Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,

Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,

Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,

Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,

Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;

All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,

The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,

The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,

Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,

Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,

The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,

The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,

Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,

Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,

The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,

The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,

The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,

The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,

The exquisite realization of health;

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,

O I say now these are the soul!

Whitman, Walt. “I Sing the Body Electric.” 1855. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

1

The first line of the poem sets up the premise that the speaker will sing about the electric body, those whom he loves, and those who love him. They surround his body, and his body surrounds them. They won’t leave him alone until he discorrupts them, bringing them to life by giving them the electric charge of the soul.

The second stanza introduces rhetorical questions. The speaker asks if corrupting the body conceals the person who does the corrupting. His rhetorical question poses the moral premise that those who corrupt the body also corrupt the soul, for the body is the soul.

2

In this section the speaker elaborates on the bodies of both men and women, stating that they defy description, though he says they are both “perfect” (Line 10). The expression of a person is visible in their body. It is not only in their face, but also in their limbs and joints and cannot be hidden by clothing. He moves from the “I” (Line 1) point of view to address the reader and say that if they or the universal “you” see such a person, “you linger” (Line 17) to observe their body.

The speaker lists a number of different types of people and parts of these people, including what they do and how they appear. These include the “fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women” (Line 19), as well as swimmers, rowers, horsemen, housekeepers, women caring for children, laborers, wrestlers, etc. The speaker describes different things they do with their bodies and the rhythms of their activities.

The speaker surmises that he loves them all, and imagines himself as part of them, “I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, / Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count” (Lines 32-33).

3

This section focuses on a single, specific man, a farmer with many sons and grandchildren. The speaker describes him as being “of wonderful vigor” (Line 35), yet also being calm, and having “beauty of person” (Line 35). The speaker describes him having pale yellow hair, black eyes, and rich manners. The speaker admits he used to go to visit the man to see these features. His sons seem to have beautiful, clean, neat features as well. The man’s sons and daughters and all who know him love him.

The man is temperate, drinking only water, which makes him look more beautiful. Even in his 80s he is active—a “gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself” (Line 43). The boat he had was given to him by a ship-joiner. He also has gifts related to bird hunting, which other male friends have given him. The speaker notes that the farmer is more “beautiful and vigorous” (Line 43) than others, even his sons and grandsons, and the speaker would pick him out from among the gang as being special. He notes “you would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other” (Line 45).

4

The speaker declares that to be with people he loves is enough, to touch people, even briefly, is enough. To be surrounded by people and their bodies is enough. It pleases the soul more than other things that may please the soul.

5

In this section the speaker focuses on the female form, saying it is full of divinity and that he is attracted to the form, specifically declaring that when he is in the presence of a woman, everything else falls away. Concrete things like “solid earth” (Line 56) fall away, as do more abstract ideas like “religion, time” (Line 56), heaven, and hell. He says his response is “ungovernable” (Line 57).

He lists body parts that are traditionally associated with female beauty and sexuality, including “[h]air, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused” (Line 59) and compares the experience to the ebb and flow of liquid. Presumably, he is describing a sexual act in poetic language saying “love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching” (Line 60). Then he continues, “Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, / Undulating into the willing and yielding day, / Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day” (Lines 62-64). Then he describes the outcome of this lovemaking as the issuance of children. Children are born of women. Men are born of women. All come to the world surrounded by a woman’s body.

He addresses all women directly, saying “Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, / You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul” (Lines 67-68). The speaker elaborates on this, saying that the female is all things in nature. He can connect with the female through nature and nature through the female. She represents all things.

6

Next the speaker focuses on the male, saying he is “action and power" (Line 77), and that the “flush of the known universe is in him” (Line 78). He contrasts man to woman noting that both are sacred, but putting emphasis on man’s pride, pursuit of knowledge, and physical power. He says that all bodies are sacred, even the bodies of enslaved people and immigrants.

7

This section focuses on the image of an enslaved person at an auction. The speaker exclaims that the auctioneer doesn’t really know what he is looking at or describing and does not appreciate the magnitude of a human form. The speaker says he will “help” (Line 98) the auctioneer see the importance of the body, and then the speaker focuses on the many aspects of the body, saying that in the head of the man, he has the same blood as anyone else. He is not only a man, but many men, including the men he will father. He asks again, how do you know what will come from him?

8

The speaker focuses on the enslaved female body, noting that like the enslaved man, she can produce many generations of children. He repeats, “If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred” (Line 125). Then he asks another rhetorical question—if the reader has ever loved the body of a man or a woman. He argues that the bodies of all people are the same, and if you understand your own body, you understand all bodies.

9

In this final stanza, the speaker declares, “Oh my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you” (Line 130). He makes his final claim that the body is the soul, his body is his poetry, and that his soul and his poems will rise or fall with the parts of his body.

He lists individual parts of the body, including large parts like “head” (Line 134), but focusing in on smaller parts like “finger” (Line 141) and “backbone, joints of the backbone” (Line 143). He uses terminology one might find in an anatomy text along with poetic euphemism, like “root” (Line 144) to stand for penis. He comments on the bowels that they are “sweet and clean” (Line 149).

The speaker adds other parts of the body that would only belong to, or be more typically associated with a female body, including, “Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, / The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings” (Lines 152-53). He adds, “The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body” (Line 159), expressing the connection between bodies.

He says again that these are not parts of the body only; they are also parts of the soul. His final line emphasizes and furthers this argument, compressing it into the line “these are the soul!” (Line 165).