Song of Myself

“I used to scream ferociously Any time I wanted I, I”

Surfaced by a community reader who hears Whitman's barbaric yawp behind the bare pronoun that closes the second verse. The argument is that the "I" is not a stalled sentence but a substitution: the child's identity and the child's noise were the same thing, so the pronoun stands in for the sound rather than introducing it. Whitman makes the same claim in the same grammar - the untamed self declared through a cry that language does not translate. It sharpens what the poem means by civility, since the adult can produce the sound only by singing it.