I Sit and Look Out

“I Sit and Look Out” did not appear in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass. It did not make an appearance until the third edition, which was published in 1860, a year before the start of the Civil War. The 1860 edition added 146 poems to the volume of poetry. The first two books were much slimmer editions: The first edition had 12 poems, and the second edition had 32 poems. This growth of Leaves of Grass showed Whitman’s desire to fashion his work into an American epic, capable of holding the diversity and robustness of American society.

“I Sit and Look Out” was published in a cluster of 24 numbered poems in the 1860 volume, showing Whitman’s interest in experimenting with arranging his growing epic into thematic groupings in the style of other Romantic works such as Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and Longfellow’s The Seaside and the Fireside. “I Sit and Look Out” is number 17 in the cluster. (Later editions would disperse the 1860 cluster.)

In the 1840s, Emerson called for an American poet who could speak to the great beauty, ambition, diversity, and promise of America. But in 1860, the great promise of America was in jeopardy. Whitman’s “I Sit and Look Out” uses Whitman’s journalistic eye, discovering the sadness and weakness in American society. There is a static and pessimistic tone to the poem as it grapples with the sorrow and treachery of the world. The speaker claims to remain “silent” (Line 10), unable to move past the oppressive weight of such suffering. This pessimistic tone is quite different from the exuberant “barbaric yawp” found in Verse 52 of “Song of Myself,” a sentiment that burst onto the scene in 1855 when Leaves of Grass was first published (Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” 1855). The speaker in “I Sit and Look Out” has no such optimism; instead, he is trapped by what he sees, suggesting that little can change. All he can do is simply sit and observe.

But Whitman’s revolutionary approach to content and form creates observations that undercut such seeming passivity. No other American poet of the time brought in the fringes of society and made them central. Bringing those that typically suffered in silence and placing them center stage gave new visibility to typically ignored segments of society. One of the innovators of free verse in American poetry, Whitman used long lines and parallelism to democratize American poetry. This short 10-line, one-stanza poem relies on anaphora, a specific kind of parallelism that repeats words or phrases at the beginning of a line, and catalogs, or lists, two structures that inform most of the Leaves of Grass and allow for Whitman’s democratic expansiveness. The first eight lines begin with “I,” plus a verb that indicates observation (“I look,” “I see,” “I mark,” “I observe,” “I hear”). This anaphora creates the expected return of “I,” allowing the speaker’s presence to bind the various images together. The length of the line is also controlled through Whitman’s reliance on semi-colons and dashes. This punctuation favors coordination of grammatical elements rather than subordination, emphasizing democratic equality among the various images rather than categorizing each social group into a hierarchy.

The first group that the speaker focuses on are the “young men” who are “at anguish with themselves” (Line 2) for deeds that they have done. While the deeds are not specified, given the sexual nature of the controversial Calamus poems that were added to the 1860 edition, one might infer that the young men may have guilt over their orientations as gay men and the accompanying desires and experiences, especially with the description of their “secret convulsive sobs” (Line 2), the “convulsions” perhaps connoting their uncontrollable passion.

The next focus of the poem is the “misused” mother who has been abandoned by her children; they seem to have grown and forgotten her. The mother is a recurring motif in Whitman’s poetry, but in other poems, she is often portrayed as a powerful source of life. In contrast, this mother is weak and “desperate” (Line 3). Similarly, the wife who has been cheated on and the young women who are seduced are further examples of women who have suffered from desire. This theme of “unrequited love” continues in the next line, and the speaker marks how those that suffer want to hide their suffering, but the poem refuses such hiding places. “I see these sights on the earth” (Line 5). While the speaker is limited in what he can do, he is able to see and witness.

“Battle, pestilence, tyranny” (Line 6) erupt in the middle of the poem, but curiously, Whitman does not allow bloody images of violence to overwhelm the poem; the speaker’s angle remains distant, and the abstract nature of the words “battle, pestilence, tyranny” (Line 6) add to the tone of desperation without explicitly showing shocking scenes of war. For the most part, the images in most of the poem are intimate, quiet, and silently despairing. Rather than battle cries, the loudest sound heard in the poem is the “secret convulsive sobs” (Line 2) of the young men, thus elevating the private domestic sorrows that can ravage a soul as just as significant as the larger global sorrows of war and disease that can ravage the world.

The poem suddenly moves from the abstract picture of battle to focus on the specific image of starving sailors at sea who are “casting lots,” figuring out who will be killed “to preserve the lives of the rest” (Line 7). This sudden jump to sea brings in the theme of fate, suggesting that not only the sailors are at the mercy of the “lot” that they choose, but so is everyone else, the young men, the misused mother, the laborer, and us, the readers. Whitman suggests that no one should feel too comfortable with their lot in life because fortunes can shift and one can suddenly find one’s self at sea, adrift, and casting lots.

His final image is of “the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like” (Line 8). Whitman does not mention slaves. Instead, he focuses on the suffering of “negroes,” which could imply both free and enslaved Africans and African Americans. His failure to mention slaves suggests a desire to avoid the divisive issue of slavery, though by this time he had clearly stated his anti-slavery views in both poetry and prose. Perhaps this suggests a desire to avoid an issue that he knew was about to set off a conflagration very soon. If so, this stance gives credence to the narrator’s own claim of bearing “silent” (Line 10) witness.