As he describes looking from the sailing vessel (the “clipper”) through the wind-blown mist (the “scud”), Whitman says “My eyes settle the land.” His eyes at this point are trying to make out the distant land through the mist and motion, and thus to steady his vision, but all through this section he is also using his eyes to “settle the land” in another sense-to occupy the continent from city to country, from the east to the west, from the south to the north, to put the land in democratic order by stretching its boundaries. Imaginative expansion, after all, is not less real than actual experience: fantasy is, in fact, one way we allow ourselves to experience what it would be like to escape rules and expected behavior, and Whitman provides us with the means to join him in widening the scope of our experiences and broadening our beliefs. But Whitman wants his poetic “I” to have experienced the breadth of the continent, so he uses stories he has heard and paintings he has seen (like Alfred Jacob Miller’s “The Trapper’s Bride”) to expand the range of his experiences. in the far west” to an American Indian woman, and never had housed a runaway slave.

The “I” of the poem is now moving beyond the actual experiences of Walt Whitman, who at the time he wrote “Song of Myself” never had gone hunting in the “wilds and mountains,” never had been on a “Yankee clipper,” never had experienced the “marriage of a trapper. After Section 8 took us on a cacophonous urban journey-with omnibuses and snow-sleighs and ambulances and carts-and Section 9 took us on a peaceful rural hayride, Section 10 takes us on a series of imaginative journeys to America’s western wilds, to the sea, and, eventually, to a stop on the underground railroad that formed a pathway to freedom for escaped slaves.

Song of myself full poem