Walt Whitman's A Song Of Myself

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“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself / I am large; I contain multitudes” (Whitman 53). In Walt Whitman's poem, "A Song of Myself", Whitman offers this bold admission, showing no embarrassment or shame: as human beings are “only human”, each one is in some way imperfect, contradictory, and inconsistent. Human nature changes from moment to moment, and we never hold the same thought or feeling for very long; the mind is always on the move. Though in very different ways, this dual nature is also very much in evidence in the two pieces of literature being reviewed for this essay: "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop, and The Bear by Anton Chekhov. Both articles, interestingly enough, bear the names of wild creatures, and …show more content…

In the words of the poem, Bishop utilizes numerous comparisons and analogies. Depicting the colossal fish she catches, she begins by first describing it as what it is: a fish. Yet early on the fish becomes something more: Bishop personifies it, referring to the fish as "he" rather than "it". She writes that "his chestnut skin hung in strips/like old backdrop," and that "[the fish was] contaminated/with little white ocean lice". She has caught more than a fish, then: on him live other creatures, for which he is their home. Bishop goes on to describe an interesting detail about this fish: he has five major snares in his lip ("on the off chance that you could call it a lip"); this tells us that the fish is a survivor. The author embodies the fish as though he was old and had endured a lifetime of injuries, even comparing the hooks to a line of hard-won medals. He is “battered and vulnerable” (8), and yet he survives even the hook of Bishop's own fishing …show more content…

Multifaceted and complex, it is possible to want and not want, just as it is possible to see and refuse to see, and to simultaneously hate and to love. The two works considered in this essay have shown that this idea transcends time and distance: it is found in both nineteenth-century Russia as well as twentieth-century America. Chekhov and Bishop both explore other common, yet related, themes as well: the transformation of one's perspective with the passage of time, as well as the animal nature underlying both human nature and the world human beings live in, contrasted with civilization. Duality is a recurrent theme in all these issues, as is the fact that everything gives way to its opposite, if one only knows where to look. Though the particulars of the dualities considered differ from work to work, this essay has nonetheless compared the literary themes found in both. In so doing, it has been shown just how much they have in common, even though they were written across generations and continents. Some aspects of human nature are truly

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