Ode to Walt Whitman

Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” has 137 lines broken into 23 stanzas (in the English translation by Simon and White). The stanzas vary in length, from four to 11 lines long. The lines also widely vary in length.

The first stanza is five lines long. It opens with a specific location for the poem—near the “East River” (Line 1) of New York City. Here, there are “boys” (Line 2) who sing while topless, or “exposing their waists” (Line 2). This begins the theme of celebrating homoeroticism: sensual descriptions of members of the same gender. The boys are “miners” (Line 4) working with tools like the wheel—an image that returns later in the poem—and “the hammer” (Line 3). In this location, there are also “children drawing” (Line 5), which mirrors the project of the poet describing the scene and “perspectives” (Line 5).

The second stanza is four lines long, and offers a contrast to the previous stanza, beginning with the conjunction “But” (Line 6). As opposed to the work of mining, this stanza focuses on natural elements. The miners do not identify with nor love the river, the nearby foliage, “huge leaves” (Line 8), or the “shoreline’s blue tongue” (Line 9).