I Sit and Look Out

While Robert Frost claimed that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” implying that free verse was not poetry because it lacked meter, Whitman’s free verse imposes poetic structures to create a rhythmic unity on his long lines in a variety of ways. In “I Sit and Look Out,” most of the 10 lines range between 20-31 syllables, except for the last line which abruptly ends at six syllables. The long lines each have caesuras or pauses in the middle of the line. If one were to break the line at the caesura, some of the lines would look remarkably like the 10 syllable conventional poems that readers were used to in the 19th century. Take the line, “I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young men” (Line 4). If that line were broken at the caesura, it would look like this:

I see the wife misused by her husband—

I see the treacherous seducer of young women (Line 4).

Much of these lines follow iambic rhythms:

i SEE/ the WIFE/ mis USED/ by her HUS/ band.

i SEE/ the TREA/ che rous se DUC/ er OF/ young WOM/ en (Line 4)

Of course, these are by no means fitting into the regular rhythms of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was also writing during Whitman’s time and much more popular to a general audience with his pleasing rhythms and narrative storylines. Whitman has no interest in forcing his lines to fit preconceived meters and line lengths. But his long, organic lines do echo iambic rhythms in his poetry. His use of “I + Verb” naturally creates an iambic unit:

i SIT

i HEAR

i SEE

i MARK

Conversational English often uses iambic rhythms naturally. Whitman was devoted to using the unaffected, ordinary speech of ordinary Americans to drive his verse, even though the lengths of his lines sometimes camouflage his use.