One Self, One soul

Reading We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self It has a lot of passion, pain, and expressiveness. The rhythm is like the pace of a heart, having moments that are quickly paced while other parts in the poem are not, but some pauses allow readers to bask in the idea the poem is trying to convey. However, I notice differences in the rhythm of the two poems. Although both have many similarities, Ambroggio has more pauses and expresses a different sort of emotion. With this poem, he expresses the deep feelings he feels for discrimination and injustice among colored people.. Like Whitman, he also lacks periods, which creates a lot of run-ons. Some things rolled off my tongue as I read the fast-paced parts, which flowed perfectly together. In Line 11, “offspring of poor and rich, of lettered and unlettered. ”  This poem, like Whitman’s, has many long sentences. But in a way, these long sentences imitate the stress in his voice, the tiredness of it all. When he goes on about the treatment certain groups of people get, he starts every chunk of text with the same word for the most part, starting with a repetition of the word from to repeating the word It from lines 43- 82. He wanted to bring the poem together and started doing it toward the end. 

This poem starts similar to Whitman’s… people are people, but things can go one way or another, but some differences set them apart; unlike Whitman, I feel he almost embraced differences, pointing them out. Whitman was getting across the point that at the end of the day, no matter what, you have your human with an oil. He uses a lot of symbolism, showing that although people might be from different worlds, certain things remain the same. He expresses his love and hate for creation… the good and bad, yes the physical world we live in, the anatomy..etc might be great but the personalities not as much. This leads to my point on his comparing things to one another. This poem is about identity, problems that certain groups of people face, and problems that Luis himself has gone through. This poem highlights that although God made humans in his image to be considered “perfect,” all are far from it. In the end, regardless of people sharing similarities in anatomy, it doesn’t automatically mean there will be respect.

A way that I saw Ambroggio’s poem translates the rhythmic enumeration of body parts in Whitman’s poem was very prominent in this specific part. I immediately noticed a connection between the two: “It suffers now, and in the next gust of wind, the discriminating smoke of random breath, for good or bad of those who intoxicated breathe ignorance or haughtiness without clusters of stars, mountains, heavenly clouds, wellsprings of gifts and meadows.” It shows similarities to what Whitman said in lines 6-10: “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,” list things in the same categories to ensure the reader understands their feelings. Overall, as for the meaning of the poems, I felt the end goal was entirely different. Whitman expresses his love for the body and the music all the body parts can make, while Ambroggio sheds a dim light on the fact that creation is beautiful but discusses how the world, indeed, can be. But I could see both trying to find peace in themselves, loving themselves despite what others say, and accepting who they are.

Victoria Sasere