4B+Serino

media type="custom" key="24573910" Paragraph Response: "I Sit and Look Out" by Walt Whitman is the speaker's account of his observations on the world. The poem is entirely about the shortcomings of mankind. He tells of ungrateful children, cheating lovers, war, and even cannibalism. He describes all of these things in one continuous thought. This is known because there is one period at the end and nothing but commas in the rest of the poem. The ending of the poem is extremely significant because it does not truly end anything. The speaker says, "All these--all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon, See, hear, and am silent." This is significant because the period ends the poem literally, however he just continues to look at the horrors of the world "without end." Whitman uses word choice like "arrogant" and "treacherous seducer" to display his view of mankind. He has nothing but shame and sorrow for the world that he is part of. The intensity of the evils that he describes throughout the poem escalate from abandoned elderly people to sailors eating one another for nourishment. Whitman does not use different structure or punctuation to emphasize the ascent in intensity. This can be interpreted as Whitman was so desensitized to mankind that he was no longer shocked by the horrors of the world. He just slowly listed his observations in a monotone fashion.