Reflection: Walt Whitman: On The Beach At Night Alone

"On the Beach at Night Alone" was a good poem. Walt Whitman uses so many different literary tools that his poems are really easy and fun to read. In the second line He refers to the ocean as "Old Mother" (Whitman). This shows that he agrees with Emerson and Thoreau about the importance of Nature. This seemed to be more like the Romanticism writers because he was really descriptive. In the time of the Realism writings, the authors seemed to be giving way less detail on the elements and Nature, so I can tell that this was not a part of the writings in the time of the Realism period. Whitman was really into giving the details. While the speaker was on the beach at night he saw the stars and the planets and the moons. I feel like he made the reader use almost all of their senses. When I read about the waves crashing in on the beach, I immediately could hear the sound of the waves crashing in from when I was in vacation in Mexico this summer. I could also seem to smell the salt. When I am at any beach, one of the things that I like the most is the smell of the salt water. I’m not sure what makes it so relaxing, but the smell is one of my favorite things about the beach. One other thing that I notice at the beach actually happens after a day at the beach. That is feeling the tightness of your skin after a day in the salt water and being in the sun all day. Whitman seems to have quite a few poems that deal with Nature. Because he wrote during the Naturalism time period, most of his poems are related to Nature. I love nature and I feel like it is still very influential in the world today. People do not seem to always treat nature with the best intentions, and nature come back to bite people in the butt. 

Huff, Randall. "'On the Beach at Night Alone'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CPAP0300&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 12, 2012).

Whitman, Walt. "On the Beach at Night Alone, by Walt Whitman." Poetry Archive. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/on_the_beach_at_night_alone.html>.