There are twenty-nine poems in this brief cluster. All except the first two, “A Boston Ballad (1854)” and “Europe,” are short, and many are aphoristic observations consisting of only two or three lines, crystalizing an image or an idea. There is no unifying theme and the concerns Whitman addresses are more disparate than those in other clusters. They include injustice, suffering, conformity, and the perils of vanity. Three of the shortest poems are simply called “Thought” (and another is called “Roaming in Thought”), suggesting that Whitman is simply sharing a notion that has occurred to him without elaboration or commentary. 

A Boston Ballad (1854)

The speaker of the poem, who is ironically distant from the poet himself, is looking forward to seeing a good show. He loves to look at the American flag and hopes that “the fifes will play Yankee Doodle.” He admires the troops with their shining cutlasses and revolvers; however, he is disturbed to see phantoms of the dead chattering and groaning at the back of the procession. He addresses these phantoms, rebuking them for their disorderly conduct, and contrasting them with their great-grandsons, who are orderly and well-dressed. He tells them to retreat back to their graves because they do not belong in the land of the living.

The speaker then says that he will ask the Mayor to dispatch a committee to England to retrieve the body of King George III from his coffin. When it has been brought to America on “a swift Yankee clipper,” they can hold another procession with the corpse of the king as its centerpiece. The king will have his revenge on the revolutionaries at last when his corpse is crowned in Boston. 

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Whitman describes sitting in a lecture hall and listening to a well-educated astronomer discuss the technical details of his subject with the aid of charts, diagrams, and columns of figures. Listening first to the astronomer’s lecture and then to the applause of the audience, he feels sick and tired, thinking that the people around him may have academic knowledge but do not truly know their subject. As he walks outside into the night air, he looks up “in perfect silence at the stars” and thinks that he knows more about the night sky than the astronomer, with his maps and charts, ever will. 

O Me! O Life!

Among crowds of the faithless and cities of the foolish, the speaker reproaches himself, “for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?” This unhappy environment has startled him, leading him to existential musings that leave him feeling uncertain and despondent. Standing still amid this futility and surrounded on all sides by “plodding and sordid crowds,” he wonders what good his life can be. The answer comes to him, profound in its simplicity, and he revels in the knowledge that:

That you are here – that life exists and identity,

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

I Sit and Look Out

The speaker sits and looks out at “all the sorrows of the world.” He hears young men sobbing with anguish and remorse and sees mothers misused by their children and wives by their husbands. Silently, he watches moments of treacherous seduction, jealousy, and unrequited love. From a comfortable distance, he notices the effects of battle, pestilence, and tyranny and sees a famine on a ship, which compels the sailors to cast lots to determine who will be killed first. He witnesses the sufferings of the poor and of Black people, who are degraded and treated arrogantly....