I mainly chose “The Capitol by Gas-Light” because of its precarious title. As you may or may not have noticed from my other ramblings in this blog, I must admit that I am at times guilty of judging books by their covers. I only selected this particular piece in Specimen Days because I had no idea what the passage would entail simply because of the title. The more ambiguous Whitman gets, the more intrigued I find myself and the more invested I become in attempting to unravel his more than complicated mind and soul.
Now that I have justified my pickings as best as possible, it is necessary that I address the subtle intricacies of the passage. The fact that Whitman is so intrigued by the government slightly bewilders me. It shows up in Leaves of Grass multiple times, and even gets referenced in titles such as “Chants Democratic and Native American” which is an odd juxtaposition of a title in the first place because he is placing the notion of a ‘democracy’ next to ‘Native Americans’ who were stripped of their land and had no say in anything when we built ours. None the less, Whitman is perceptive of this notion and I believe that “flitting figure in the distance” could very well be representative of a Native American. This may be a huge stretch, but the “flitting figure” at the end of the passage is undoubtedly a significant occurrence, because whether or not it represents a Native American, it resembles the ever fluctuant state of the American government.
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