Live Oak, with Moss, is a free verse poem composed by Walt Whitman in the late 1850s during the transcendentalism and realism movement. The poem, published in the “Calamus” poems section along with Leaves of Grass, is considered one of the most direct homosexual narrative of its time. During the 19th and 20th century, homosexuality was inappropriate and often believed to be a mental illness. Nonetheless, the poem narrates the homosexual love and affection the speaker has for a man as well as the agony and confusion associated with it. As seen in the poem, love is a powerful emotion that affects the speaker’s view of himself and happiness. With the use of literary elements such a first-person narrative, personification, imagery, and metaphors…show more content… Whitman proceeds the poem with a personification of elements found in nature such fire, water, and air as aforementioned. These natural elements are frequently perceived as powerful and unchangeable. With this interpretation, by personifying these elements, Whitman claims that several characteristics of love are: it is aggressive like fire, destructive like the sea and delightful like the air. His tone in this stanza is hopeless while describing his consuming love. Similarly to the natural elements previously stated, Whitman’s love for his unnamed lover cannot be tamed nor restrained. Thereafter, in the fifth stanza, Whitman says “the land of the prairies engrossed me […] the south savannas engrossed me […] I would be their orator”. By personifying the “land of the prairies”, Whitman asserts that his identity once consisted of knowledge from these locations and being their voice to the public. However, the use of “engrossed” represents that Whitman became a voice without his approval and was not content with his position. Moving to the eighth stanza, Whitman deals with the aftermath of his lover’s abandonment. In this stanza, Whitman uses the personification of time to reveal his anguish and sorrow he endures as a result of his lover being content without him in his life. He commences the stanza by stating “Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted” with a mournful tone. Due to his personification of “hours”, Whitman illustrates the passage of time. From his perception, time is slowly passing, and his melancholy tone causes time to appear endless as if his heartache would never end from this world. This is further seen when Whitman repeats “hours discouraged, distracted” a few times later in that stanza as he copes with his sorrow. As stated by Carlisle in “Walt Whitman: the drama of identity”, there is a lot of guilt,
