“O Me! O Life!” Introduction

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892) first published "O Me! O Life!" in the 1867 edition of his famous collection Leaves of Grass. The poem's speaker wonders what the point of living is, when the world is so ugly and broken and nothing ever seems to get better. The speaker gets a surprising "Answer" from a nameless voice that might represent the speaker's own inner wisdom, or even life itself: the fact that life exists at all, this voice replies, is a miracle. The answer to the speaker's despair, this poem suggests, is thus to remember that simply being alive is an awe-inspiring privilege.

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“O Me! O Life!” Summary

• Oh, me! Oh, life! Oh, the questions about existence that I grapple with over and over. I think about the infinite processions of people who don't believe in anything, about whole cities filled with silly, thoughtless people. I think about how I'm always scolding myself (because who's more of an unbelieving fool than I am?). I think about how people desperately (and fruitlessly) long for understanding, about how our goals are lowly and petty, about how we're always pointlessly striving. I think about how little ever comes of all our efforts, and about the unsavory people I see moving slowly around me. I think about all those peoples' pointless lives, and about how I'm caught up in their pointless lives, too. So the tragic question keeps coming back to me: what possible good can I find in this existence?

  Answer: the good is that you exist at all; that life is real, and selfhood is real; that the grand drama of life keeps on going, and that you've been given the privilege of writing some lines for it.

“O Me! O Life!” Themes

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  The Meaning of Life

  The speaker of “O Me! O Life!” is profoundly fed up with the world. Looking around, all the speaker sees is foolishness, sorrow, suffering, and regret. What, the speaker thus wonders, is the point of being alive at all? But in the depths of this despair, the speaker receives a mysterious “Answer”: merely being part of the grand “play” of existence, a mysterious voice tells him, is enough reason to carry on. In other words, to this speaker, the fact that life simply exists is reason enough to feel wonder and awe—even when the world is at its most dispiriting.

  The world often feels like one big disappointment to the speaker—like a failed experiment that’s getting nowhere. The world is full of “foolish” people, “sordid” (or dirty and unsavory) crowds who seem only to get “poor results” in whatever they try to do. The speaker doesn’t exempt themselves from this judgment, either, but is quick to note that they’re just as foolish as the rest of the population. In the depths of despair, the speaker sees the world as “empty and useless,” and longs in “vain[]” for the “light”—that is, for some kind of wisdom, hope, joy, or understanding that never seems to arrive.

  The resolution to this problem, the speaker suggests, isn’t to pretend that life isn’t hard and sad, or to console oneself with false optimism. Rather, it’s to be amazed that life exists at all.

  This insight arrives in the form of an “Answer” from a mysterious voice, which tells the speaker that the “good” of life is that it is—and that the speaker, who also is, has the amazing chance to play a part in existence. There’s the feeling that life itself is answering the speaker here, responding by simply asserting its own miraculous reality. And the speaker’s own soul is a part of this life, sharing in its power and beauty.

  In short, the plain fact that there’s something rather than nothing is enough of a “light” of hope and wonder to making living worthwhile. In this speaker’s view, pausing to consider how unlikely and miraculous it is that one exists at all can give one enough energy to keep on living in a world of pains and disappointments—and even to feel pretty good about it.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “O Me! O Life!”

• Line 1

  O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,

  The speaker launches into this poem with an exasperated outburst: "O me! O life!"

  Right off the bat, the reader might find something a little odd in the exclamation "O me!" This now-unusual expression was once a common lament, along the lines of "Aw, man!" It turns up in Shakespeare, for instance, when Juliet is sighing on her balcony. But by the time Whitman was writing in the 19th century, this turn of phrase (technically an example of apostrophe) would already have felt old-fashioned.

  That dramatic "O" makes the speaker's outburst feel even more loaded. "O" is a grand word, the kind of word one would use to address a goddess (as Keats does in his "Ode to Psyche," for instance). There's something big and serious going on here, then, not just a minor complaint. This speaker is having powerful feelings, grappling with something difficult.

  That serious thing might be both "me"—the speaker's self—and "life" in general. For it's "the questions of these" that "recur[]" to the speaker, repeating themselves over and over. In other words, not only does this speaker have big questions, those questions don't seem to have clear answers: the poor speaker has to ask them again and again, struggling with a mystery.

  Much of the rest of this free verse poem will investigate that mystery in rhythmic, free-form lines.

• Lines 2-3

  Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
  Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

  

  

• Lines 4-6

  Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
  Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
  Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

  

  

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• Line 7

  The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

  

  

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• Between Lines 7-8, Lines 8-9

                                       
    Answer.
  That you are here—that life exists and identity,
  That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

  

  

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“O Me! O Life!” Symbols

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  Cities

  Cities, in this poem, symbolize civilization itself.

  When this poem's speaker looks around and sees "cities fill'd with the foolish," there's the suggestion that every city—every place where people get together—is inevitably full of fools, because everyone is a fool. Cities, like civilization, might outwardly seem grand, impressive, and, well, civilized. But deep down, to this speaker, all human effort feels ultimately "empty and useless." The huge, crowded, "sordid" cities of this poem thus suggest the speaker's grand-scale disgust with humanity and its failings.

  • See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“O Me! O Life!” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Alliteration

  The alliteration in "O Me! O Life!" evokes the speaker's despair—and the calm power of the voice that responds to that despair. Take a look at lines 2-3, for instance:

  Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
  Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

  The muffled alliterative /f/ sounds in these lines make it sound as if the speaker is practically spitting these words in disgust and defeat. (That effect is only heightened by the fact that the speaker repeats the words "foolish" and "faithless.")

  The /p/ sounds in line 5 do something similar:

  Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

  That sharp, plosive /p/ also makes it sound a little as if the speaker is spitting in disgust—and evokes the heavy "plodding" this line describes.

  But when the speaker's questions get a reply, the answering voice uses /p/ alliteration rather differently:

  That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

  Here, the strong /p/ of "powerful play" feels, well, powerful! And in linking the words "powerful" and "play," /p/ alliteration makes it sound as if power is an inherent quality of that play. Life's mere existence, in other words, is a mighty force.

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• Assonance

  

  
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• Aporia

  

  

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• Apostrophe

  

  

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• End-Stopped Line

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

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"O Me! O Life!" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Recurring
• Trains
• Reproaching
• Vainly
• Objects
• Mean
• Plodding
• Sordid
• Intertwined

• Arising again and again.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “O Me! O Life!”

• Form

  "O Me! O Life!" is a free verse poem and doesn't use any standard form, like the sonnet or the villanelle. But it does have a meaningful shape.

  The poem is broken into two parts: the speaker's initial seven-line cry of anguish, and a mysterious voice's two-line "Answer."

  After all the speaker's "recurring" and agonized questions about why people are so stupid and life is so disappointing, the other voice's reply feels awfully brief. And that's exactly the point. The "Answer"—that the mere existence of life is a matter for deep wonder—is at once profound and as simple as can be.

• Meter

  As a free verse poem, "O Me! O Life!" doesn't use a regular meter. It feels urgent and intimate, free from the rigid constraints of metered verse. That said, the poem is still powerfully rhythmic, using bold stresses to evoke the depth of the speaker's torment. Take the opening spondees (feet consisting of two stressed beats in a row) of "O me! O life!"

  Driving stresses like these evoke the urgency and pain of the speaker's questions about life all through the poem: the lines seem to pound like a troubled heart.

• Rhyme Scheme

  Like a lot of free verse poems, "O Me! O Life!" doesn't use rhyme. The poem's music instead comes from patterns of sound within the lines, like assonance and alliteration. The lack of steady, plodding rhyme keeps things feeling urgent and intimate, like a call directly from the speaker's heart.

“O Me! O Life!” Speaker

• The first-person speaker of this poem feels alone in a crowd—but also stuck in it. Tormented by the futility of most human efforts, the speaker writes off whole populations as fools. But the speaker is also quick to note that they themselves might be the biggest fool of them all. From where the speaker sits at the beginning of the poem, life looks like a pointless and ugly struggle.

  This speaker isn't in total despair, though. They're still striving for meaning, desperately asking "What good" life might possibly have to offer. And the speaker is a thoughtful enough listener that they even get an "Answer" to that huge question. A mysterious voice that might belong to some deeper, wiser part of the speaker—or even to "Life" itself—replies that the mere fact that life exists is enough of a miracle to make being alive worthwhile.

  Readers might suspect that the speaker here is Whitman himself: much of Whitman's poetry is written from his own perspective, and this speaker's grand, emotive, mystical tone is extremely Whitmanesque. But this speaker could also be anyone who's ever wondered about the meaning of life.

“O Me! O Life!” Setting

• "O Me! O Life!" is set in a bustling, grimy, and dispiriting city. Over and over, the speaker emphasizes just how many people there are around—and not one of them isn't a total fool, the speaker very much included. In fact, the speaker feels that it's not just the city they're stuck in that's miserable, but cities in general: every town is "fill'd with the foolish."

  The speaker thus makes a sweeping denouncement of civilization in general. The setting here isn't any city in particular: it's every city, everywhere that people have ever gathered to do the silly, pointless things that they seem eternally to do.

Literary and Historical Context of “O Me! O Life!”

• Literary Context

  "O Me! O Life!" first appeared in the 1867 edition of Walt Whitman's magnum opus, Leaves of Grass. This sprawling collection of poems grew and evolved all through Whitman's life. The first edition appeared in 1855, but by the time Whitman died in 1892, he'd revised and reprinted it seven times, and every edition sprouted a few new poems. "O Me! O Life!" is textbook Whitman: a free-verse, first-person reflection on life's biggest questions, delivered in plain clear language.

  Whitman is often seen as a founding father of the 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement. Both imbued with mysticism and firmly rooted in the natural landscape, his poetry was an inspiration to fellow American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

  But, like his contemporary Emily Dickinson, Whitman was also one of a kind, standing apart from the literary world around him with an inimitable style. Whitman pioneered free verse at a time when most poetry was still bound by metrical convention, and he remains acknowledged as a master of the form.

  More than 200 years after his birth, Whitman is still one of the world's best-known and most beloved poets. Some of his poems are so famous they're almost proverbial: for instance, "I am large, I contain multitudes" is a line from his "Song of Myself."

  Historical Context

  In 1867, when this poem was first printed, Walt Whitman had every reason to feel pretty disgusted and weary with humanity. The American Civil War had ended only two years before. While Whitman didn't fight in that war himself—one of his friends once said that imagining the pacifistic Whitman on a battlefield was as incongruous as imagining Jesus Christ holding a gun—he saw plenty of its horrors when he volunteered in military hospitals.

  A firm opponent of slavery, Whitman felt great hope and relief when the Union won the war. But that relief was short-lived: he was devastated when, shortly after the end of the war, Lincoln was assassinated. Whitman had deeply admired and sympathized with Lincoln. (And the feeling was mutual: Lincoln is known to have read poems from Leaves of Grass aloud.)

  But Whitman's grief became his muse. Whitman's sorrow over Lincoln's death and the Civil War in general inspired poems like "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and pushed Whitman into deeper spiritual waters. His conclusion in "O Me! O Life!"—that existence is inherently miraculous—is all part of the transcendent understanding of life that he developed in the wake of terrible times.

More “O Me! O Life!” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud.

  • A First Edition — See an image of the first published edition of the poem at the Whitman Archive, and learn more about Whitman's poetry.

  • A Short Biography — Learn more about Whitman's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.

  • The Whitman Museum — Visit the website of the Walt Whitman museum, where you can learn more about the world in which Whitman lived and wrote.

  • The Whitman Bicentennial — Read about Whitman's enduring legacy. Over 200 years after his birth, he remains one of the world's most influential and beloved poets.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Walt Whitman

  • A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown

  • A Noiseless Patient Spider

  • Beat! Beat! Drums!

  • Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

  • I Hear America Singing

  • In Paths Untrodden

  • I Sing the Body Electric

  • O Captain! My Captain!

  • One's-Self I Sing

  • The Voice of the Rain

  • When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

  • When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d