Birds and Birds and Birds

For my Specimen Days entry this week I went with the dartboard approach and selected at random. I landed on the entry Birds and Birds and Birds. This is a relatively short entry where Whitman speaks of his fascination with the myriad of birds singing and flying overhead as he sits outside on a spring day. He then challenges himself to see how many species he can name and goes on to list more than thirty. While the entry is all of two lines and then a list of a bunch of birds, I find it fascinating (as I do most of the entries in Specimen Days given how many of them are so deliciously random) because, despite its brevity, I can see so much of Whitman’s core in it. You feel his love of being outside, his interest in nature, his love of birds and animals, and his somewhat odd need to catalogue the world around him. The entry reads like free flowing thought and I can feel the direct correlation of how Whitman lives his own life with the themes he writes about in his poetry.