Assurances
Assurances - meaning Summary
Limitless Confidence in Providence
Whitman presents a confident, self-contained speaker who requires no external assurances. He asserts an intuitive certainty that the world and its unseen faces, immense cosmos, and everyday particulars all hold intrinsic majesty and purpose. Life and death, wrecks and personal losses, and nested layers of perception are ultimately provided for within a vast, interconnected order. The poem affirms boundless continuity between the self, nature, and the universe.
Read Complete AnalysesI NEED no assurances—I am a man who is preoccupied, of his own Soul; I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside the hands and face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant of—calm and actual faces; I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world; I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless—in vain I try to think how limitless; I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of orbs, play their swift sports through the air on purpose—and that I shall one day be eligible to do as much as they, and more than they; I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and on, millions of years; I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors—and that the eye-sight has another eye-sight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice; I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are provided for—and that the deaths of young women, and the deaths of little children, are provided for; (Did you think Life was so well provided for—and Death, the purport of all Life, is not well provided for?) I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them—no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone down, are provided for, to the minutest points; I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen, any where, at any time, is provided for, in the inherences of things; I do not think Life provides for all, and for Time and Space—but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all.
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