Literatuer and writing

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Song of Myself and the Swimming Hole

The Swimming hole and Song of Myself are two classical pieces of art Swimming hole is a painting while Song of Myself is a long poem . Both carry the sentiment of their times because they were made just after the American Civil War . Both impart a wishful thinking of how life might be better if it were like that instead

The swimming hole by Thomas Eakins is an 69 .5 x 92 .4 cm oil painting of several

naked men swimming in what looks like a lake or a river . The bodies of the men are idealized , meaning they are buff and well built There is no clue in the painting why they are naked but from the look of the men they are not ashamed of their nudity

The painting is still life , taken from point of view several meters away from the men . The background is a beautiful natural scene with green grass , clean air and pure river . It is nature at its finest . The men are not bothered by being naked , they are innocent like children or man before his fall from grace . The painting is like a an idyllic romantic scene of how life could have been

The poem Song of Myself by Walt Whitman was written from the perspective of a thirty-seven year old man who is hopeful that he will live for many years to come . It catalogues American life and the constant search for the boundaries of the self . There are three important sections in the poem

The first is found in the fourth and sixth sections where the narrator is still a child . He uses symbolism to break things down to essential principles . Grass in the child 's hands become a symbol of nature 's regenerative powers . Grass is also a symbol of democracy as it grow everywhere . This section is also a bit depressed because Whitman wrote this just after the civil war and he was deeply saddened by all the death there just to protect democracy

The second episode is found in the eleventh section . A woman watches twenty eight young men bathing in the ocean . She has fantasies about joining them and she describes their naked body in some detail . This is a weird section because the women is peeping at the men and seems to get excited by seeing them . It is in this section that it is related to the swimming hole because both portray a person watching naked men swimming . In the twenty-fifth section he has trouble expressing his encounters to others without faking it or making it less real . He decides he will do nothing to change what he has seen and just tell it as it is

Strange but the author does not write in chronological . The poem begins in the middle , goes back to the start and then goes towards the ending

To conclude , except for the second important section Song...