In “Mannahatta” Whitman sings a song for his city.
In a “culminating song” the trumpeter plays a song of victory, a song in which “reborn races appear” and Whitman is filled with joy. Whitman calls on the trumpeter to give him a vision to renew his soul.
All of the “measureless shame and humiliation of my race” becomes his to bear. The trumpeter’s song turns dark and Whitman takes on the songs of all those that are oppressed in the whole earth. All love is worth singing of, “Love, that is all the earth to lovers – love, that mocks time and space….” Whitman begins to think that he is, himself, “the instrument thou playest” since his heart and soul have melted in the song. Whitman calls on the trumpeter to take on the “pulse of all” and to let the theme of love be his only song. Whitman describes a “wild trumpeter” in the poem “The Mystic Trumpeter.” He is a “strange musician” and Whitman calls him to blow “free and clear” so that he can follow. All of these faces “show their descent from the Master himself…are all deific….” He sees the brave and sturdy faces of the laborers and common people of the land, yet he also sees the disgusting and “slobbering” faces of death and evil. In “Faces,” Whitman speaks of crossing the country and encountering a multitude of faces of the people he passes. Whitman says that he understands the sun, how “before the fitting man all Nature yields” and Whitman says that he knows its flames and “perturbations” well. Whitman sings of a hot October sun in “Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling.” He tells the sun that he has always loved it, even as a boy, and that now as a man he may launch his “invocation” to it.