38 pages • 1-hour read
I Hear America Singing
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Symbols & Motifs
The Varied Carols
“I Hear America Singing” could have been America’s great “song” of work. Given Whitman’s fascination with the cooperative weave of sounds rather than his adherence to the strict rules of expected rhythm and anticipated rhymes, he could have selected really any of dozens of words to suggest the choral play of uncountable millions of Americans singing their way through the work day: melody, for instance, or symphony, aria, ballad, song, hymn, canticle, all come to mind.
The word the poet uses, however, is carol, a word that comes to the poem freighted with more than musical symbolism. The word “carol” actually comes from the Greek, meaning “circle,” and refers to ancient joyous songs to which working-class folks without the benefits of education or social status and with no dancing instruction would spontaneously dance in great animated and boisterous circles, a celebration as much of community as the raucous music that would play, stirring them to spontaneous movement. Through the rise of the Christian Church, however, in the Middle Ages, the word carol came to be associated more with strictly religious songs, usually attached to one of the emerging Church’s holy days, most often Christmas. Thus, the carols that the poet hears America singing as its working-class goes off to work symbolize both the community of that new nation, gathered even if apart, to commence the work day, itself elevated to a kind of everyday holy day, infusing those carols with religious intensity and spiritual meaning.
Blue Collar Work
The kind of work the poet celebrates appears to challenge the premise of the poem itself. Curiously, Whitman’s celebration of the spiritual reward of labor rests on occupations that seem gloriously inglorious, practical, and pragmatic: mechanics, carpenters, brick masons, sailors, shoemakers, hatters, carpenters, and farmers.
If a poet wanted to elevate work to the spiritual dimension, if a poet wanted work to reveal a transcendent level enough to gift those who work the trade to feel sufficient emotional and spiritual intensity to feel their heart and soul sing, surely the poet would select occupations that bring with them a certain grandeur and grace: poets, artists, teachers, ministers of state, religious leaders or thinkers, inventors, scientists, professions that suggest intellectual as well as creative energy, professions that represent the best and brightest of a culture, even a civilization. Know America by its poets, its presidents, its generals, its entrepreneurs—not by its bricklayers, its plowboys, or its seamstresses.
In celebrating the blue-collar professions, Whitman draws on his own hard scrabble childhood and his own difficult adolescence making do by pursuing the kinds of jobs few aspired to have: hard, grimy, difficult, dangerous work with long hours and low pay. There, however, is where the poem finds the transcendent reward of work—dignity—there in the very professions the grand inherited poetry of Great Britain, a tradition of poetry that first shaped American poetry in the work of the Fireside Poets (who were themselves for the most part professional poets) and then provided a model for Whitman’s feisty generation to wholly reject, to toss off boldly and happily, a kind of giddy and crazy literary reboot of the Boston Tea Party. In blue-collar work is where you find the spirit of the new nation: not in libraries or in museums or in universities and certainly not in churches. Find the spirit of America, the poet demands, on isolated farms, small shops, noisy factories, and ships dangerously crossing the sea, each and all every day providing the new nation its economic livelihood.
Working Women
Working women: They are there in the poem, slipped in at Line 8, without fanfare, without belaboring explanation, without self-indulgent bloviating social commentary, but added as if, well, no kidding, women work too. For a contemporary generation, Line 8 comes and goes without startling attention. There amid the men, the plowboys and the sailors and the mechanics, are women, full-time stay-at-home mothers, wives working to make stable and reliable the home to which their husbands, presumably out doing “manly” jobs, can return, and the tedious jobs available to unwed women in their twenties and thirties and even well beyond: sewing, often in nearly intolerable factory settings, and taking in the wash of those wealthy enough to resource out such onerous chores. These were not the jobs typically accorded to women in mid-century society; American society liked to think that women were given jobs with dignity that played to the perception of feminine virtues: Women were nannies, teachers, maybe, nurses. If American women toiled through baskets of rich people’s laundry or sewed for hours until their eyes were dim and their fingers crooked, or cleaned the home or made meal after meal, that, well, the nation preferred not to mention.
It is not that Whitman, a vocal advocate for women’s rights in his inflammatory newspaper editorials, approves of the limited range of job opportunities available for women in antebellum America. Rather it is that here in a poem he acknowledges the work of these women, equates them with the demands of the manly jobs, elevates them from obscurity and gifts these women with the same right to spiritual reward, the same sense of meaning, and the same integrity of a national identity. In this, nearly a century before America itself would come around to celebrating working women, Whitman was among the earliest American poets to give women (symbolically at least) a voice in the grand national carol of working.
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