"I Sing the Body Electric" begins with a crackle of energy. As the speaker proclaims, "I sing the body electric," there's a sense of both excitement and mystery: it seems as if this poem will be a "s[o]ng" of praise. But what exactly is the "body electric" it'll be praising?
That line might have felt even more striking when this poem was first written in the 19th century—when people were only just starting to harness electricity:
- Nowadays, electricity has connotations of sparkling, lively, vibrant, and potentially dangerous energy (think of how people will sometimes use the word "electricity" to describe sexual attraction). But for this poem's original audience, electricity might also have felt novel, inventive, and astonishing. Whitman's first readers wouldn't have thought of electricity as a utility bill, but as a just-barely-contained force of nature: more lightning than lightbulb!
- Electricity might also have been seen as a force that could bring things to life. Only a few decades before this poem was written, scientists like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta discovered that they could make dead worms wiggle and dead frogs kick by applying electrical currents to their muscles—discoveries that led many to speculate that electricity might be the key to reviving the dead (and that were a direct inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).
If this speaker is about to "sing the body electric," then, he's about to praise the human body as something that practically shoots sparks—something charged up with a mysterious, enlivening, and awe-inspiring force. Life itself, to this speaker, is "electric."
He's been inspired to sing this song by "the armies of those [he] love[s]," who "engirth" (or encircle) him. He, in turn, engirths them: it seems as if he's at once surrounded by and, somehow, surrounding all these beloved people.
There's something magical about this image, and something metaphorical about those "armies." The speaker's loved ones aren't all literally soldiers. But they feel to him like a mighty force, ready to fight for a cause. And they're both inside him and outside him. He can "engirth" them with his imagination and his affection, holding them inside himself just as they can literally hold him from the outside.
In other words, it's as if the strength of the "love" the speaker feels for these people fills him up and gives him courage—as if, in singing this song in praise of the body, he's about to set off on an epic quest or fight a battle. Clearly, he feels that there's a cause he needs to stand up for, here.
And the "armies" of his beloveds aren't going to let him get away with not standing up for that cause! "They will not let [him] off" until he "respond[s] to them": something about the force of their mutual love also means he has to "sing the body electric." Singing this song will also make the bodies of his loved ones even more "electric": he must "charge them full with the charge of the soul." Doing so will "discorrupt" them, purify them somehow.
All of this suggests that this song of the "body electric" won't just be a song of delight. It will be a song about something special about the body: the way it's "charge[d]" with the soul, animated with the soul's electrical energy. Defending that belief will be an act of purification, a way to "discorrupt" the speaker's loved ones. And it will, apparently, take a good deal of courage.
In other words: this won't just be a poem about how the body is lively, brilliant, exciting, and soulful. It'll be a poem about what that belief means, and how it should change the way that people live.