Very Well Then

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself.

These two lines, though perhaps not as stirring as other moments in “Song of Myself,” are deeply humane and telling about the poem as a whole. I noticed that the narrator was inconsistent on occasion, even downright naive in some places, and I had trouble reconciling these passages with the rest of the poem. Consider the following lines for instance:

The disdain and calmness of martyrs,

The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry

        wood, her children gazing on,

The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the

        fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,

The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the

        murderous buckshot and the bullets,

All these I feel or am.

Now compare them to this passage which appears later in the poem:

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my

       my brother, my sister?

I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous

       upon me,

All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with

       lamentation

(What have I to do with lamentation?)

Clearly, there’s a contradiction here (one of several within the poem). In the first passage, Whitman presents us with this noble sense of empathy and connectedness with mankind. He suffers where the people suffer. He hurts where they hurt. He recognizes the cruelty and wrong being committed. In the second passage, however, Whitman seems to bask in ignorance and good fortune, untroubled by the world and the same cruelty. I cannot help but feel that “I am sorry for you” is written with a condescending and churlish tone. It’s almost like he’s saying “too bad—that sucks for you.” It’s infuriating since this doesn’t sound like the same narrator that we readily listened to for the first half of the poem (not to mention the fact that we're dealing with issues like slavery and bigotry). He’s now difficult to trust, and I doubt everything that he’s told me before.

But when Whitman admits to his contradictions — and embraces them  — in these two lines, he is repeating this idea that he is imperfect (which makes him perfect). He is willing to admit to whatever mistakes he’s made because they are human mistakes, human contradictions. His intention is not be consistent but to encapsulate all human experience, to be “made up of multitudes.” “I resist any thing better than my own diversity,” he says. He seems to be exploring these different ideas haphazardly. And however frustrating and oblique this might make the poem, it nonetheless makes it something that, I think, lives and breathes—its a poem that changes its mind, wavers, perhaps says things that it doesn’t mean to say, balances different points of view, enters different skins, and puts on different faces.