Whitmania: Round Three, Earth...

“Earth, My Likeness”

Earth, my likeness,
Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,
I now suspect that is not all;
I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible to burst forth,
For an athlete is enamour’d of me, and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.


This poem of Whitman’s displays at least two notions that we have come to associate with the British Romantic Movement and at least one notion that is unique to the American Romantic Movement.

The first notion of British Romanticism that Whitman explores is that of the macrocosm and the microcosm. In the first line of the poem he writes “Earth, my likeness.” He is reminded of nature when he looks at himself and vice versa. One is reminded of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” in which the speaker sees the world in a grain of sand. The speaker of “Earth, My Likeness” experiences the same phenomenon when he looks at himself.

Secondly, Whitman shares the same reverence for a force shared between earth and humanity that the British Romantics had for nature. The speaker of the poem says, “I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.” When the speaker is in the presence of the athlete there is the same fierce force (be it sexual or otherwise) that there is when he or she experiences nature. Therefore, the vastness of nature and its sublimity over power the speaker and as a result adequate words escape him.

The first line also shows a unique aspect of the American Romantics. Whitman writes of the earth that there is “something fierce in [it] eligible to burst forth.” Similarly this same force threatens to burst forth out of the speaker when he is with the athlete. He shares this force with the earth and it is this force which transcends the human/nature boundary. This effort on Whitman’s part keeps with Emerson’s view of how American writing should portray their relationship with nature.