And then we must all resurrect ourselves, heal our gashes, rise again to do the work of building a wide-ranging democracy. And, as he does so, he evokes the story of Christ’s resurrection but does so in a remarkably secular way: we all experience a “crucifixion and bloody crowning.” We all bear a cross, wear a crown of thorns, and we must all learn-as Whitman has been instructing us in this poem-to take on the suffering and pain of others. The poet now reclaims this fraction that has stayed away too long. Those sunnier aspects form the majority of life’s moments, even if, during bleak times, that larger fraction can be eclipsed and lost for awhile. “I resume the overstaid fraction,” the poet says, indicating that when we encounter the most painful parts of experience, they can come to seem all-consuming, as we forget the generative and loving and developing aspects of life. In this section, the poet finds himself “on the verge of a usual mistake,” the error of mistaking the mockery and insults and tears and blows as the essential meaning of life.

It is a pledge that he would once again make during and after the Civil War, when he and the nation needed to absorb 800,000 deaths and find a way to build a future out of the carnage instead of seeing the carnage itself as the definition of what the country had become. We may be momentarily stunned by the terrors we encounter, the pain we witness, but we must rise again from it and carry on into the future. In one of the most rousing moments of the poem, he shouts a threefold reprimand to himself: “Enough! enough! enough!” Yes, he realizes, we must recognize the death, suffering, sickness, pain, and abjection in the world, but we must also realize that, horrific as it may at times seem, that dark side of life is never the whole story. Four exclamation marks open this section as the poet suddenly regains the energy and desire to rise up from the humiliating position of the beggar that he found himself in at the end of the previous section.

A song of myself