Leaves of Grass #5

"I am the hounded slave...I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me...crack and again crack on marksmen.
I clutch the rails of the fence...my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,
They taunt my dizzy ears...they beat me violently over the head with their whip-stocks."

For many of the poems, Whitman has been the observer. However in this section, he has become the things that he is observing. He becomes the wife, then the man, and finally the slave. By him becoming them, he understands who they are and what they have to go through. This gain of understanding is what Whitman has been looking for and in a sense is his epiphany because he now has the awareness he's been looking for.

The passage above begins with him finally realizing the place of a slave, which is the harder for him to understand because it's the farthest to what he was. He has understand the position so much that he can feel the pain that a slave feels. "My core dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin" is an example of his realization. After, he says, "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels... I myself become the wounded person. In this area, he syntactically favors describing himself, follow by an ellipsis, and then something occurring to him. This has an interesting effect because it parallels the slave or his characteristics with what is occurring with it, but at the same time dividing them. This paradox expresses the complexity of the social issues at the time and the tough life of a slave.