Comment 71 of 72, added on May 31st, 2007 at 12:46 PM.

I would like to comment that i view this poem as a symbol of American nationalism. It seems to me that Whitman is using singing as a symbol of the sounds that working creates, turning the sounds of industry into music. But at the same time he is portraying a happy world. It's obviusly about the American Dream, but it is also about finding joy in your work. The main issue i have with the poem is within the two sentences: "The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat - the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck." Life was not so rosy being a worker in America. Sure it is nice now after the workers got a lot more rights, but this was written while Capitalism was in it's prime. Being a worker was not that nice, the life of a worker was not far from what we would regard as hell. While Whitman being the posetive American would write something like this, the british writer Charles Dickens shows the negativity of the time. While the age of enlightenment was supposed to bring great prosperity and joy to the workers (read: The American Dream) working conditions did not really improve that much. If you were born poor in Britain you died poor, the same held true for America, except here you had a small chance at becoming rich. Even though a chance is better then no chance the overly posetive poem clearly showcases the ambivolence of the time. People did not just want to think they were in a time where everyone was important, they wanted to believe it. Personally i hate Nationalism. If you look at earlier societies like Germany and Italy you can see what it leads to. Fascism follows Nationalism and Fascism can be regarded as distilled Nationalism in my opinion.
A nationalistic attitude is nothing to be proud of, it only leads to racism. As a last note i would like to mention that even if the American Dream offered a second chance to a lot of people, we don't even have to dig deeper then the slaves to understand that not everyone had such a great life.

Alexander from Norway