You Felons on Trial in Courts
You Felons on Trial in Courts - meaning Summary
Solidarity with the Condemned
Whitman’s speaker confronts social judgment by identifying with prisoners, prostitutes, and other outcasts. He confesses shared guilt and inner corruption, rejects praise and moral distance, and insists he cannot condemn those he recognizes in himself. The poem asserts empathy and radical solidarity, refusing to separate the self from society’s marginalized and thereby challenging conventional distinctions between sinner and citizen within the inclusive ethos of Leaves of Grass.
Read Complete AnalysesYOU felons on trial in courts; You convicts in prison-cells—you sentenced assassins, chain’d and hand-cuff’d with iron; Who am I, too, that I am not on trial, or in prison? Me, ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain’d with iron, or my ankles with iron? You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs, or obscene in your rooms, Who am I, that I should call you more obscene than myself? O culpable! I acknowledge—I exposé! (O admirers! praise not me! compliment not me! you make me wince, I see what you do not—I know what you do not.) Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch’d and choked; Beneath this face that appears so impassive, hell’s tides continually run; Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me; I walk with delinquents with passionate love; I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?
Feel free to be first to leave comment.