"The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck...

The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other.

(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer at you,)"

         ~Leaves of Grass, page 10

It's hard to choose which lines from Song of Myself are my favorite. For one thing, there's a lot of lines. Then there's the fact that different lines stand out for different reasons. So do I choose the lines that I personally relate to? The ones that are completely foreign? The ones that just plain sound pretty? Oh well. I eventually settled on this one, because it sounded pretty, I loved the imagery, and I loved the implications (not to mention the way it relates to the rest of the poem... but more on that later).

First of all, I had to actually look up one of the words in this part. Blackguard. It's pretty. I like pretty words. It also adds a lot of meaning to this line. According to Dictionary.com...

Black-guard
noun
1. a low, contemptible person; a scoundrel
2. Obsolete


Meaning number 1: Not that surprising of a noun when being associated with a prostitute. So, when using this meaning, it's almost a throwaway word. The crowd laughs at a scoundrel's oaths, a prostitute's oaths, it's almost repetitive. Why not just say they laughed at her oaths? (poetic diction aside)

But then replace it with that second definition. Obsolete. Think about it. That's harsh. Going back to my friend Dictionary.com, obsolete means something out of date, disused, discarded. Oath means vow, or promise. So these people are laughing at the discarded vows of a prostitute. Perhaps I'm reading too deep into this, but I immediately make connections to vows of love, like wedding vows. And in all honesty, can you blame these men for laughing at her? Can anyone take the promises of a prostitute seriously? It's a joke to them, that a whore could have anything other than blackguard oaths.

And then we get to my favorite part of the line. Whitman defends her. He doesn't laugh, he doesn't jeer. He is dismayed that others would treat her as such, calls them miserable. It's very beautiful to me. Not to mention, it's very true to the overlying theme of this entire poem. Equality of person. To tie in another favorite line of mine (aren't I clever?):

"In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them"

             ~Leaves of Grass, page 14

So everyone's the same, and when Whitman compliments or degrades himself, he is doing the same to the rest of the world. But this works both ways, too. If someone disrespects another (such as our prostitute), then they are also disrespecting Whitman. To insult one is to insult all. It's the whole, "love your neighbor as yourself" thing broken down into a more broad scape.

It's a good message, written in a very pretty way. I like pretty words.