Journal 30- Beautiful Women

For this journal, I was given the opportunity to pick my favorite Walt Whitman poem from Leaves of Grass.  I did not know how to go about picking my favorite because I have not read the entire thing because it is so long.  Scrolling through the list of poem titles, I came across one that seemed "okay" at the time.  The title was "Beautiful Women," and I think I was interested in reading it because I wanted to know what Walt Whitman had to say about them, considering some of the poems I have read from Leaves of Grass.  I did not even have to read other poems to figure out that this one was my favorite.  First of all, I love how simple it is--simple, not because of how extremely short it is, but how Walt Whitman did not have to use an entire page to paint a picture in my head.  The whole poem is only two stanzas long.

"Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,
The young are beautiful--but the old are more beautiful than the young." (Whitman)

When I read this, I pictured a scene similar to what you would see in Gone With the Wind or something in the Antebellum South period (the Old South before the Civil War).  I imagined big, beautiful dresses with delicate details.  My first instinct was to assume that "beautiful" women meant young women, and I was surprised to read Walt Whitman's statement that the younger women were not as beautiful as the older women (Whitman).  I can definitely see it, because they do not have a naive look about them, but more an air of intelligence about them.  Everyone knows that intelligence on anyone is attractive.

I think that the main reasons I like this poem were the simplicity of it and its ability to create such a mental image with every few words...they kind of go hand in hand.  If Walt Whitman had taken the idea from "Beautiful Women" and prolonged it into a page-long story like the rest of his poems, I do not think I would have liked it as much.  There is only so much you can say, but it honestly would not have been such a nice surprise to see how small it was...and I'm really not just saying that because I did not want to take the time to read a long poem and analyze it; this was the first poem that I picked and I honestly enjoyed it.


"The Walt Whitman Archive." BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. (Leaves of Grass [1891-1892]) -. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.