I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman

Full Text

1
I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

2
The love of the Body of man or woman balks account—the body itself balks account;
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

The expression of the face balks account;
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does
  not hide him;
The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress,
  their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,
The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent
  green-shine, or lies with his face up, and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the
  water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats—the horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives
  waiting,
The female soothing a child—the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn—the sleigh-driver guiding his six horses through the crowd,

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured,
  native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown, after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
The upper-hold and the under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through
  clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the
  listening on the alert,
The natural, perfect, varied attitudes—the bent head, the curv’d neck, and the
  counting;
Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the
  little child,
Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause,
  listen, and count.

3
I know a man, a common farmer—the father of five sons;
And in them were the fathers of sons—and in them were the fathers of sons.

This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person;
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the
  immeasurable meaning of his black eyes—the richness and breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see—he was wise also;
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old—his sons were massive, clean,
  bearded, tan-faced, handsome;
They and his daughters loved him—all who saw him loved him;
They did not love him by allowance—they loved him with personal love;
He drank water only—the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his
  face;
He was a frequent gunner and fisher—he sail’d his boat himself—he had a fine one
  presented to him by a ship-joiner—he had fowling-pieces, presented to him by men that
  loved him;
When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him
  out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang.

You would wish long and long to be with him—you would wish to sit by him in the boat,
  that you and he might touch each other.

4
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck
  for a moment—what is this, then?
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the
  contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well;
All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.

5
This is the female form;
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor—all falls aside but
  myself and it;
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, the atmosphere and the clouds,
  and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed;
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it—the response likewise ungovernable;
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands, all diffused—mine too
  diffused;
Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb—love-flesh swelling and deliciously
  aching;
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and
  delirious juice;
Bridegroom night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn;
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

This is the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, the man is born of woman;
This is the bath of birth—this is the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.

Be not ashamed, women—your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest;
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The female contains all qualities, and tempers them—she is in her place, and moves with
  perfect balance;
She is all things duly veil’d—she is both passive and active;
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in nature;
As I see through a mist, one with inexpressible completeness and beauty,
See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast—the female I see.

6
The male is not less the soul, nor more—he too is in his place;
He too is all qualities—he is action and power;
The flush of the known universe is in him;
Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well;
The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost, become him
  well—pride is for him;
The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul;
Knowledge becomes him—he likes it always—he brings everything to the test of himself;
Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail, he strikes soundings at last only
  here;
(Where else does he strike soundings, except here?)

The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred;
No matter who it is, it is sacred;
Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere, just as much as the well-off—just as much as you;
Each has his or her place in the procession.

(All is a procession;
The universe is a procession, with measured and beautiful motion.)

Do you know so much yourself, that you call the slave or the dull-face ignorant?
Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight?
Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float—and the soil is on the
  surface, and water runs, and vegetation sprouts,
For you only, and not for him and her?

7
A man’s Body at auction;
I help the auctioneer—the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen, look on this wonder!
Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for it;
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years, without one animal or plant;
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain;
In it and below it, the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve;
They shall be stript, that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant back-bone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and
  legs,
And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood!
The same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart—there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations;
Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and
  lecture-rooms?

This is not only one man—this is the father of those who shall be fathers in their
  turns;
In him the start of populous states and rich republics;
Of him countless immortal lives, with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?
Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the
  centuries?

8
A woman’s Body at auction!
She too is not only herself—she is the teeming mother of mothers;
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Have you ever loved the Body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the Body of a man?
Your father—where is your father?
Your mother—is she living? have you been much with her? and has she been much with you?

—Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all, in all nations and times, all
  over the earth?

If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted;
And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful
  face.

Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her
  own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

9
O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the
  parts of you;
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they
  are the Soul;)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that they are poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s,
  young man’s, young woman’s poems;
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, 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.

Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls,
  finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body, or of any
  one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman—and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks,
  love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul,
O I say now these are the Soul!

Overview

"I Sing the Body Electric" is Whitman's most radical poem — the one that insists the body is not merely the house of the soul but is the soul itself. The final line states it without qualification: "O I say now these are the Soul!" This is not metaphor. Whitman means it literally. The body's parts — "Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears" — are not physical containers for something spiritual. They are the spiritual thing. The poem builds toward this claim across nine sections, moving from declaration (section 1), through observation of bodies in motion (section 2), to a portrait of a perfect old man (section 3), to erotic encounter (sections 4-5), to the assertion of universal bodily sacredness (section 6), and finally to the slave auction scenes (sections 7-8) where the argument becomes political: if the body is the soul, then slavery is not just a crime against persons but against the divine itself. The poem's structure is Whitman's characteristic catalogue — long lists that accumulate rather than argue. Section 9 is the most extreme catalogue in English poetry: an anatomical inventory from "Head, neck, hair, ears" down to "toes, toe-joints, the heel," with every part named as sacred. The catalogue is deliberately excessive because Whitman's point requires exhaustiveness. If he left anything out, the claim would be that only some parts are the soul. By naming everything — including "man-balls, man-root" and "the womb, the teats, nipples" — he insists on total sacredness, including the parts polite society refused to name.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-8

"I SING the Body electric" — the title-line announces a new kind of singing. "Electric" was still a charged word in 1855 — galvanic, scientific, modern. "The armies of those I love engirth me" — love is military and physical. "And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul" — "discorrupt" is Whitman's coinage: to remove corruption through contact. The rhetorical questions that follow establish the poem's thesis: "if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?" — if not this, then what? The question has no other answer.

Lines 9-37

Section 2 is a catalogue of bodies in action: swimmers, rowers, horsemen, girls, mothers, laborers, wrestlers, firemen. "To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more" — the well-made body is a poem in itself. This is not decoration; it's Whitman's aesthetic theory. Poetry and bodies are parallel forms of expression. The catalogue doesn't discriminate: "The group of laborers seated at noon-time" sits beside "The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath." All bodies are equally worth watching.

Lines 38-55

Section 3 presents a specific old man — "a common farmer" who is "six feet tall, he was over eighty years old." This man embodies the body-soul unity: his physical beauty ("the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard") is inseparable from his wisdom. "They did not love him by allowance — they loved him with personal love" — love for this man isn't dutiful but genuine and physical. "You would wish long and long to be with him — you would wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and he might touch each other" — the desire for physical contact is presented without embarrassment.

Lines 56-66

Section 4 declares sufficiency: "to be with those I like is enough." The passage is a hymn to physical presence — not sex specifically but proximity, touch, the "contact and odor" of other people. "I do not ask any more delight — I swim in it, as in a sea" — delight is not a destination but an environment. "All things please the soul — but these please the soul well" — the repetition of "please the soul" with the added "well" is Whitman's way of distinguishing between general and specific satisfaction.

Lines 67-92

Sections 5 and 6 address the female and male body respectively. Section 5 is Whitman's most explicitly erotic passage: "Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it" describes sexual arousal with botanical metaphor. "Bridegroom night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn" — the sexual act becomes a cosmic event, night penetrating dawn. Section 6 pivots to the male: "The flush of the known universe is in him" — the male body contains the universe's energy. Then the political turn: "Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?" — every body is sacred regardless of social status.

Lines 93-120

Sections 7 and 8 are the poem's political center: slave auctions. "A man's Body at auction; / I help the auctioneer — the sloven does not half know his business" — Whitman takes over the auctioneer's role to show what is really being sold: not labor but sacredness. "For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years" — the body on the block is the product of all evolution. "A woman's Body at auction!" — section 8 extends the argument to women. "Have you ever loved the Body of a woman? / Have you ever loved the Body of a man?" — the questions make the reader complicit. If you've ever loved a body, you've acknowledged its sacredness — and slavery violates it.

Lines 121-152

Section 9 is the great anatomical catalogue: every part of the body named from head to toe. "Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears" begins the inventory. "Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root" — Whitman names genitalia alongside elbows and ankles, refusing to hierarchize. "The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean" — even internal organs are "sweet and clean." The catalogue ends with the thesis: "O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, / O I say now these are the Soul!" The body's parts are the soul's parts. There is no separation.

Themes

• The body and soul as identical — not metaphorically but literally
• The sacredness of all bodies regardless of race, class, or gender
• Slavery as violation of the divine
• Physical touch as spiritual communion
• The catalogue as democratic form — everything included, nothing ranked
• Sexuality as cosmic force, not private shame
• The human body as the product of all evolution
• Beauty present in every anatomical detail

Literary Devices

Catalogue

"Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, / Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows" — Whitman's signature technique: exhaustive listing. The anatomical catalogue in section 9 names over 100 body parts to demonstrate that nothing is excluded from sacredness. The form enacts the argument — if anything were left out, the claim would be incomplete.

Rhetorical Question

"And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?" — The question has no other answer. Whitman doesn't argue for body-soul identity — he dares the reader to propose an alternative. The question is unanswerable, which is the point.

Anaphora

"Have you ever loved the Body of a woman? / Have you ever loved the Body of a man?" — The repeated "Have you ever" makes the reader answer privately. If yes, then you already believe what Whitman is arguing — you just haven't admitted it. The anaphora is an accusation disguised as a question.

Neologism

"And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul" — "Discorrupt" is Whitman's invention — to undo corruption through contact, to purify by presence. The word enacts what it describes: Whitman corrupts English to create a new meaning, just as physical contact transforms the corrupted.

Role Reversal

"A man's Body at auction; / I help the auctioneer — the sloven does not half know his business" — Whitman takes over the slave auctioneer's role not to endorse slavery but to expose what is really being sold. The auctioneer doesn't know his business because he doesn't know the body's true value — it's cosmic, not commercial.

Declarative Climax

"O I say now these are the Soul!" — The poem's final line is not an argument, not a metaphor, not a suggestion — it is a declaration. The exclamation mark, the "O," the present tense "now" — Whitman announces his conclusion as revelation, not conclusion.

Historical Context

First published in 1855 as part of the original "Leaves of Grass" (without its current title — that was added in 1867), the poem appeared in a pre-Civil War America where slavery was legal in half the country. Whitman's slave auction sections directly challenge the institution by insisting on the sacredness of bodies that the law treated as property. The poem was considered obscene — its frank treatment of sexuality and anatomy led to Whitman's dismissal from a government job in 1865. The anatomical catalogue in section 9, especially its naming of sexual organs, was unprecedented in published American poetry. Whitman revised the poem across multiple editions of "Leaves of Grass," expanding the catalogues and sharpening the body-soul argument.