“Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman is familiar, widely admired, and often alluded to by later readers and writers. In certain respects, the poem is iconic, for it speaks symbolically of American mobility, restlessness, and love of freedom and open spaces. The poem’s 224 lines, which in 1881 Whitman arranged in fifteen sections, are divisible into two parts: sections 1-8, the persona’s exuberant description of the healthful lessons and benefits of open-air living on the road, and sections 9-15, the persona’s impassioned invitation to companions to join him in his liberating and ultimately spiritual journey.

The poem begins with the first-person narrator setting out on a “long brown path.” The journeyer is “Afoot and light-hearted,” for he is done with the routines, customs, and safe behaviors of his previous life, “done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms.” He renounces a life devoted to the conventional pursuit of material success: “Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.”

Early in section 2 the journeyer acquires an egalitarian ethos; he learns “the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial” of any man or woman. Even nature, it appears, is governed by a democratic principle, as the persona observes the “light that wraps [him] and all things in delicate equable showers!” In section 5, in a moment of quasi-mystical dilation, the journeyer declares his spiritual independence: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,/ Going where I list, my own master total and absolute.”

The first half of the poem concludes with reflections on wisdom, which is not to be found in schools, philosophies, or religions: “Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.” To understand the nature of wisdom is to discover the source of happiness.

Beginning in section 9 of “Song of the Open Road” and extending through the fifteenth and last section, the persona speaks directly and insistently to the reader: “Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!” The word allons, French for “let us go!” or “come on!,” introduces all but one of the poem’s final seven sections. Rising to a fever pitch, the persona urges his reader to reject the established and formulaic: “Allons! from all formules!/ From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.” He exhorts all men and women “to know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.” He warns that to journey on the open road is to endure a struggle, a battle. He says he must be honest: “I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,/ These are the days that must happen to you.” The poem ends with the persona awaiting an affirmative response from his reader, his would-be “Camerado.”

Like nearly all the poems Whitman included in the final edition of Leaves of Grass, “Song of the Open Road” is written not in traditional accentual-syllabic meters but in free verse. Whitman did not invent this poetic technique but remains one of its most celebrated practitioners. His distinctive use of free verse is indebted to the prosody of the English Bible and is notable for its long line. Sometimes, as in section 13 of “Song of the Open Road,” one of his lines is so long that it threatens to exceed the very boundaries of the page and has to be broken up into indented units:

All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was  or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into  niches and corners before the procession of souls along