There Was a Child Went Forth by Walt Whitman is very curious poem for analysis and interpretation due to its symbolic nature as well as to the abundance of stylistic devices that compose it. The poem tells us a story of personal becoming carefully listing all the factors that impact this process. Whitman believes that personal becoming is a two-layer process: first, a child is free to perceive the world in an individual manner allowing the imagination to color it into any shades possible; second, a child inevitably gets acquainted with the realm of the human life with its doubts and concerns. The present essay will provide a detailed analysis of both layers discussing and describing the stylistic devices that Whitman uses to convey his message and to illustrate the contradiction between them.
To begin with, the given poem is particularly interesting from the standpoint of the stylistic devices involved. Whitman uses mainly repetition, parallel constructions and asyndeton to convey the realm of the American world shifting swiftly from the pleasant feel of the natural world to the anxious and disturbing human world. In this view, the poem is distinctively divided into two parts. The first part depicts the child’s acquaintance with the natural side of life. In this part, the child is absorbed in the exploration of the key objects that are most meaningful in his environment – “the noisy brood of the barnyard,” “the mire of the pondside,” etc. (Whitman line 8). At this stage, the child’s imagination plays a vital role for it shapes the child’s perception of the things he comes to learn. In this part, Whitman mainly uses the repetition, or, putting it more precisely an anaphora, to, first and foremost, create a certain rhythm and to show how varied and diverse the environment is in the child’s eyes.
The second part of the poem conveys the child’s introduction to the human life with their worries and troubles. The child gets acquainted with the unpleasant side of a human nature mainly through his “mean, anger’d, unjust” father (Whitman line 8). The shift from the world of nature to the world of humans is very sharp and abrupt which shows that the child is unprepared for this unpleasant experience. Whitman replaces the anaphora with parallel construction so that the repetition of the described scenario becomes less intensive and evident, but, instead, more stable and inevitable.
Interestingly, it is only in the second part of the poem that the child starts asking questions about the things and phenomena that he gets acquainted with. These questions are rhetoric in their nature and the impossibility of receiving the answer to them is the core reason for the child’s affliction and regret. Whitman uses this device in order to show how one’s introduction to this world is essentially associated with an accumulation of new doubts and concerns. The more closely the child gets to know what surrounds him, the more lost and insecure he feels.
As mentioned before, Whitman places a strong focus on creating a dynamic rhythm in this poem. The most evident device that serves to accomplish this goal is the repetition. A closer examination of the text, however, allows one to see that the rhythm is likewise maintained through the use of asyndeton. Thus, prepositions or other conjunctions are almost absent in this poem which is why the text looks somewhat disjointed and incoherent. In this view, it can be supposed that this incoherency is intentional. Whitman seeks to create an image of a kaleidoscope inside which objects, events, and people form a chaotic blend that is a reflection of the child’s personality.
