![]() ![]() The poet’s encounter with the “wild gander” is itself a “gander,” in the figurative sense of that word (“to gander” is to take a long look, to crane our necks like a goose in order to see all around us): Whitman ganders at the gander and translates its non-verbal cry into letters. Continuing his observation of animals from the previous section, he has here a momentary conversation with a “wild gander,” who speaks his “Ya-honk” to the poet, who listens “close” to it and (unlike the impudent or “pert” folks who are have learned to arrogantly disregard the sounds of birds), he finds something deeply meaningful in it. In this section, Whitman offers his most radical statement of democratic identity: “What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me.” This is the poet’s credo: he will discover himself not in the exotic, the faraway, the difficult, or the costly, but rather in the common people he encounters every day and the animals that inhabit and enliven his world. Whitman, writing about education, once commented that “good brains ancient & modern agree that what is nearest & commonest is always last to be realized.” Most of us spend our lives devoted to the distant and the abstract, only to recognize too late that the miracles all around us all the time are what we have deadened ourselves to. ![]()
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