Spontaneous Me
Spontaneous is an impulse of doing something that isn’t in your normal routine. How Whitman represents the feeling of being spontaneous is by nature. Nature is often changing from a calm scenario to all of a sudden a scene filled with recklessness and chaos.
“The same late in autumn, the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark green…”
Probably the two most unexpected seasons are those of spring and autumn. One moment it can be a warm and sunny day and the next an unexpected frost can come in or a violent storm may occurred. He chooses autumn for his setting. When he mentions the” same late in autumn” he is building suspense for the reader since after all, his poem is titled Spontaneous Me. He creates a lot of imagery throughout the story. Such as when he mentions the different colors of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark green he is creating the illusion of autumn. He is also creating that autumn is spontaneous itself since it is all of these different colors. He also uses a lot of diction throughout his poem.
“The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry”
He repeats the word “poem” three times throughout the story. A poem is usually a group of words and phrases that focus on something but in a more artistic and personal way than writing. There are also different types of poems. He uses poems because some may be straightforward and others may not, thus again indicating the concept of spontaneously. He also mentions something curious. He mentions that all men are a form or a poem. A poem usually represents a very intricate soul. A man is often seen as very self-righteous and loud individual. By comparing himself and all men he is emphasizing that people don’t appeared to be what they seem, and that everybody is a somewhat complex individual. Throughout his poem Whitman keeps on making reference to nature, but now to a whole different concept. He uses the concept of sex in a male and a female. He uses again details and forms of imagery to demonstrate his point. One point that he makes is that the young man is red, ashamed, and angry. Red usually represents embarrassment. He also mentions that the young man is ashamed that is a somewhat weird concept. A woman is the one who is often seen as the ashamed one not only in life but in books and poems. With this idea he opens up a whole new concept of love making. He also makes a reference to masturbation in his poem.
“The young man that wakes deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master him;”
Maybe this is the cause of the young men’s shame. Whitman wrote this poem in the era in which such act was considered dirty and foul in God’s eyes. In all, Whitman tries to make the reader comprehend that nature and sex isn’t that all different in the whole spontaneously concept.