Although often lambasted by establishment critics and more prominent poets of his era as an uncouth, uneducated “barbarian,” Whitman was no fool. He knew firsthand the onerous obligations of work. It is an axiom of a consumer capitalist society now and in Whitman’s era: If anyone actually liked to work, they wouldn’t have to be paid to do it. Here, however, workers go about their routine, backbreaking and tedious, nevertheless joyously singing. This whole whistle-while-you-work argument is, granted, idealistic. It is not how work is but how work might be, could be, maybe even should be. Like every work by every Transcendentalist (and Fireside Poet, and for that matter, every Christian theologian back to Augustine) Whitman’s argument here is set against, even despite, reality not because of it.

Everything in Whitman’s own background would render ironic the happy argument that celebrates work as deeply, unapologetically rewarding. Surely Whitman must be mocking the idea of rewarding work. After all, Whitman as a child had watched his father lose what little savings the family had by pursuing a pipe dream, a tantalizing longshot real estate speculation scheme that was designed to rescue him from the thankless drudgery of crafting an endless procession of tables and chairs for the homes of the wealthy people in nearby Manhattan. When that venture collapsed of its own folly, Whitman’s father returned unhappily to carpentering, work made manageable only by self-medicating with alcohol.

That hard-scrabble life compelled Whitman himself to leave school at the tender age of 11 and go to work just to help his family make ends meet. As for more than a decade, Whitman, with a sixth grade education and minimum marketable skills, moved about job after job—endlessly copying legal documents, then painting houses on Long Island, then setting heavy lead type as a printer’s apprentice, then briefly as an entirely unqualified schoolteacher, and then as a journalist until a catastrophic fire destroyed the newspaper’s offices—work was more tragic than joyous, more about failure than celebration, more an act of desperation than an act of self-expression. And during a brief stint in New Orleans shortly before he began working on the poems that would become the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman realized the moral outrage and the routine indignities of slavery; until that time slavery had been something of an abstract concept for him, more a word than a way of life.

In short, Whitman knew the destructive, corrosive effects of work on the human soul, knew the desperation of a minimally educated working class struggling to secure sustenance (not dignity and purpose) through work, any kind of work; and the degradation and moral hypocrisy of slavery itself. Whitman knew that Americans hardly went off to work singing.

It is easy then to dismiss Whitman here as at best some chirpy optimist or some out-of-touch waffle-head or at worst a kind of unpaid shill for capitalism, an overly-enthusiastic hawker of slogans, a peddler of cheap snake-oil optimism on behalf of a corporate enterprise that, in the soul-crushing business of building an economically viable country in the 1850s, otherwise degraded the dignity of its own workers, dehumanized them into cogs within wheels they turned, and dismissed as an eccentric irrelevancy the humanity of their workers.

To dismiss the joyous argument here because it fails to capture the grim reality of work is to hold it accountable for a mission and a purpose Whitman rejected. Walter Whitman, a 40-something misfit, a failed teacher, failed house painter, failed printer, failed carpenter, failed just about everything, defiantly, boldly created the persona of Walt Whitman, American Poet, as less an act of hard-hitting documentarian realism and more an act of theological inspiration. The argument here, like any work of theological argumentation, offers up a vision of what might be, a tantalizing affirmation of a way of life available for the commitment to it. What you produce as a worker—whether it be a cleaner ship’s deck, a repaired shirt, a tidy basket of laundered clothes, a sharp-angled table, a pair of shoes with intact soles—that product would not exist save for your effort, it “belongs to him or her and to none else” (Line 9). And although often the dreariness of such employment may slip from the understanding, although there are days when surely the carpenter, the housewife, the wood-cutter may not feel as if their work is like their “strong melodious song” (Line 11), days when the dirty clothes are dirty clothes, when the torn shirt is a torn shirt, when the grimy deck is a grimy deck and that all the work to improve that will inevitably have to be done again and again, the poem offers like any religious writing a strategy not to change that reality (that would indeed make Whitman naïve and his poem silly) but rather to change the perception of that reality.

Work, the poem argues, is more than the unalterable conditions of that work. In this dreary and all-too-secular world, work is what provides the integrity, purpose, and ultimately the redemption of the individual.