Journal 46: Work Songs

What Whitman is trying to express is that Americans are happy working laborious, repetitive, low paying jobs and that the workers joyfully enjoy their work as they sang song of praise to whatever they are doing; whether it is the carpenter measuring his plant of beam, the mason's routine work duties, or the girl sewing. Whitman sees that the ordinary working class people, and women, are the real heroes of America, they represent the essence of America and America represents the people at the lower end of the social pyramid. In his poem of praising America for being America, he expresses that the people of America are truly happy and that life here is amazingly good. However, I think that Whitman's point of view of the laborers and the lower class people are not accurate and that Whitman's optimistic view of the workers and of life in general is very much different from most of the people of low status. Whitman has never worked as a low class worker, earning money from sweat and hard physical labor but all he sees are people around him, working as hard as they can trying to get by and he believes that this is the true American way of living and that the people doing their job, the reason they do it, is because they love their job and they are happy with their lives.