This poem, while being short, also holds a lot of meaning in its few lines. It is a poem that makes the reader a person looking west into the Pacific Ocean from a shore in California pondering the world beyond the range of their vision. Letting their imagination turn to the far off lands of the Asian continent and all of the different things it holds. People thought, as they do today, that mostly everything about Asia and North America are very different. Asia has had civilizations for a very long time, and America had been created not long ago, relative to the time civilizations in Asia had started. I think that this is how Whitman thinks about it because Whitman says “From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero” (Whitman 6). He also alludes to the fact that once the speaker is in Asia and then looks back home towards the East, they are “pleas’d and joyous” (Whitman 9). From there, he says at the end that he no longer knows where he started and wonders why it (where he started) has yet to be discovered. I think that this is about how people seem to want something different than what they have, and once they get it, they want what they used to have and can’t remember why they didn’t want it in the first place.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Journal #30
I’ll be honest with you, the reason why I first chose this poem was simply because the fact that it had California in the name, and I dream one day of living in California, so this poem had an unfair advantage to be my favorite Whitman poem. I was happy and relieved to find out that it was also a shorter poem, compared to Song of Myself which was on par with the Iliad and Odyssey, and so I would be able to analyze it in a shorter amount of time and therefore being able to spend more time thinking about what it really means.
This poem, while being short, also holds a lot of meaning in its few lines. It is a poem that makes the reader a person looking west into the Pacific Ocean from a shore in California pondering the world beyond the range of their vision. Letting their imagination turn to the far off lands of the Asian continent and all of the different things it holds. People thought, as they do today, that mostly everything about Asia and North America are very different. Asia has had civilizations for a very long time, and America had been created not long ago, relative to the time civilizations in Asia had started. I think that this is how Whitman thinks about it because Whitman says “From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero” (Whitman 6). He also alludes to the fact that once the speaker is in Asia and then looks back home towards the East, they are “pleas’d and joyous” (Whitman 9). From there, he says at the end that he no longer knows where he started and wonders why it (where he started) has yet to be discovered. I think that this is about how people seem to want something different than what they have, and once they get it, they want what they used to have and can’t remember why they didn’t want it in the first place.
"The Walt Whitman Archive." FACING WEST FROM CALIFORNIA'S SHORES. (Leaves of Grass [1891-1892]) -. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. <http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/43>.
This poem, while being short, also holds a lot of meaning in its few lines. It is a poem that makes the reader a person looking west into the Pacific Ocean from a shore in California pondering the world beyond the range of their vision. Letting their imagination turn to the far off lands of the Asian continent and all of the different things it holds. People thought, as they do today, that mostly everything about Asia and North America are very different. Asia has had civilizations for a very long time, and America had been created not long ago, relative to the time civilizations in Asia had started. I think that this is how Whitman thinks about it because Whitman says “From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero” (Whitman 6). He also alludes to the fact that once the speaker is in Asia and then looks back home towards the East, they are “pleas’d and joyous” (Whitman 9). From there, he says at the end that he no longer knows where he started and wonders why it (where he started) has yet to be discovered. I think that this is about how people seem to want something different than what they have, and once they get it, they want what they used to have and can’t remember why they didn’t want it in the first place.
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