In "Song of Myself" Whitman revels in himself, his body, his soul, nature, all mankind, all animals and plants, the heaven and earth and sea, the dead and the living, good and evil, the past and the present, because it is all one, merged together, celebrated both in its separate and distinct detail and its unity. He writes, "Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;/ I am large . . . . I contain multitudes." Through pages and pages of free flowing thoughts transcribed in free verse, with no regular meter or rhyme, no formal stanzas or line breaks, Whitman pounds his theme again and again, with the passion of a preacher at the pulpit, merging man and nature, as well as time, and deifying the merged result: "I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,/ Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself./ Why should I wish to see God better than this day?/ I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,/ In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass ...."
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