17 pages • 34 minutes read
Walt WhitmanAmerica
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Mother
“America” reimagines America itself as a “herself.” America becomes an enthroned mother, a kind of queen at once regal yet loving, gentle yet powerful, intimate yet “towering” (Line 5). As “Mother” (Whitman capitalizes the word), America suggests not only compassion and care for the present generation but also a protective sense of the promise of future generations as well. For Whitman, who used cultural stereotypes about both parent roles throughout Leaves of Grass, mothers represent both enduring strength (Mother America is enthroned and “towering”) and unconditional love whereas fathers are associated more with inflexible authority and stoic endurance. Mothers, because of their intimate role in gestation and childbirth, exist perforce in two tenses simultaneously, as much a part of the present as they are essential to the nurturing promise of tomorrow. In this, the mother symbol reveals Whitman’s argument about the resiliency of America. America as mother thus becomes a symbol of both community and futurity.
Daughters and Sons
Whitman, in using the terms “equal daughters” and “equal sons” in the poem’s opening line, represents America’s new confidence in the concept of inclusivity. More than a century before psychologists and sex therapists would begin to dispute the dual model of gender identification as simplistic and reductive, that genitalia does not define gender, Whitman uses the male/female dichotomy rather than the term “children” to suggest how America now welcomes both genders, elevates both genders to equality status (ironic, given the ongoing push for civil rights for women in the decade during which the poem was composed). Written to a nation that had suffered through a bloody civil war fought to defend an entrenched system that had institutionalized differences between its citizens, “America” declares in its opening line that now Americans are equal. Daughters and sons, then, becomes Whitman’s umbrella term to re-boot the relevancy of what the Declaration of Independence had offered as a cornerstone principle for the new nation more than a century earlier: the self-evident truth that all Americans are created equal.
The Abiding Earth
America, the poem argues in Line 4, is perennial along with the Earth. Whitman’s dramatic and powerful affirmation of the longevity and durability of the American experiment invokes a familiar passage from the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, a reference familiar to the overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian audience that made up Whitman’s readership. In using nothing less than the Earth itself as metric for the promise of America, the poem suggests that America will abide forever, whatever upheavals it will inevitably have to endure from economic downturns to catastrophic wars to the struggle for universal civil rights (all elements of Whitman’s Gilded Age. Drawing from the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 1:4, generations will come and generations will pass but the nation will abide forever. That promise of its endurance was not lost on Whitman’s readers, many of whom still remembered the harrowing experience of a war that nearly ended the nation a scant 70 years after its beginnings. But Line 4 also contains Whitman’s caution that such durability rests on the nation not turning away from its core principles ever again: freedom from tyranny, respect for the law, and the spirit of community and brotherly love.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
