Previous Next

As a poem written in free verse, “Song of Myself” doesn’t make prominent use of rhyme. Whitman does occasionally feature moments of internal rhyme, as in line 14:

     Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes.

But such examples are rare, and as this line suggests, Whitman is just as likely to repeat whole words as partial word sounds. As for end-rhyme, there’s virtually none to speak of in the entire poem. It might be possible to argue for a few moments of slant rhyme. Take, for instance, the repeating “-or-” sound in “north,” “corner,” and “shore” (lines 197, 198, and 199). Yet the poem’s overall lack of rhyme makes us readers less likely to register such imperfect sound pairs as rhymes. And in any case, Whitman’s lines are often so extended and uneven in length that, even if we agreed to call them rhymes, it would still be very difficult to “hear” them as such. But far from being a deficiency, the poem’s lack of rhyme is highly significant. Throughout “Song of Myself,” the speaker strives to demonstrate that everything in the universe, no matter how disparate, is related. In this sense, the lack of rhyme implicitly teaches us that we needn’t rely on surface resemblances to see things as interconnected.

Previous section Meter Next section Key Poetic Devices

Take a Study Break