Faces
1
SAUNTERING the pavement, or riding the country by-road—lo! such faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality;
The spiritual, prescient face—the always welcome, common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad
at
the
back-top;
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows—the shaved blanch’d faces
of
orthodox citizens;
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face;
The ugly face of some beautiful Soul, the handsome detested or despised face;
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of many children;
The face of an amour, the face of veneration;
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock;
The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face;
A wild hawk, his wings clipp’d by the clipper;
A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder.
Sauntering the pavement, thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry, faces, and faces, and
faces:
I see them, and complain not, and am content with all.
2
Do you suppose I could be content with all, if I thought them their own finale?
This now is too lamentable a face for a man;
Some abject louse, asking leave to be—cringing for it;
Some milk-nosed maggot, blessing what lets it wrig to its hole.
This face is a dog’s snout, sniffing for garbage;
Snakes nest in that mouth—I hear the sibilant threat.
This face is a haze more chill than the arctic sea;
Its sleepy and wobbling icebergs crunch as they go.
This is a face of bitter herbs—this an emetic—they need no label;
And more of the drug-shelf, laudanum, caoutchouc, or hog’s-lard.
This face is an epilepsy, its wordless tongue gives out the unearthly cry,
Its veins down the neck distended, its eyes roll till they show nothing but their whites,
Its teeth grit, the palms of the hands are cut by the turn’d-in nails,
The man falls struggling and foaming to the ground while he speculates well.
This face is bitten by vermin and worms,
And this is some murderer’s knife, with a half-pull’d scabbard.
This face owes to the sexton his dismalest fee;
An unceasing death-bell tolls there.
3
Those then are really men—the bosses and tufts of the great round globe!
Features of my equals, would you trick me with your creas’d and cadaverous march?
Well, you cannot trick me.
I see your rounded, never-erased flow;
I see neath the rims of your haggard and mean disguises.
Splay and twist as you like—poke with the tangling fores of fishes or rats;
You’ll be unmuzzled, you certainly will.
I saw the face of the most smear’d and slobbering idiot they had at the asylum;
And I knew for my consolation what they knew not;
I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother,
The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen tenement;
And I shall look again in a score or two of ages,
And I shall meet the real landlord, perfect and unharm’d, every inch as good as
myself.
4
The Lord advances, and yet advances;
Always the shadow in front—always the reach’d hand bringing up the laggards.
Out of this face emerge banners and horses—O superb! I see what is coming;
I see the high pioneer-caps—I see the staves of runners clearing the way,
I hear victorious drums.
This face is a life-boat;
This is the face commanding and bearded, it asks no odds of the rest;
This face is flavor’d fruit, ready for eating;
This face of a healthy honest boy is the programme of all good.
These faces bear testimony, slumbering or awake;
They show their descent from the Master himself.
Off the word I have spoken, I except not one—red, white, black, are all deific;
In each house is the ovum—it comes forth after a thousand years.
Spots or cracks at the windows do not disturb me;
Tall and sufficient stand behind, and make signs to me;
I read the promise, and patiently wait.
This is a full-grown lily’s face,
She speaks to the limber-hipp’d man near the garden pickets,
Come here, she blushingly cries—Come nigh to me, limber-hipp’d
man,
Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon you,
Fill me with albescent honey, bend down to me,
Rub to me with your chafing beard, rub to my breast and shoulders.
5
The old face of the mother of many children!
Whist! I am fully content.
Lull’d and late is the smoke of the First-day morning,
It hangs low over the rows of trees by the fences,
It hangs thin by the sassafras, the wild-cherry, and the cat-brier under them.
I saw the rich ladies in full dress at the soiree,
I heard what the singers were singing so long,
Heard who sprang in crimson youth from the white froth and the water-blue,
Behold a woman!
She looks out from her quaker cap—her face is clearer and more beautiful than the
sky.
She sits in an arm-chair, under the shaded porch of the farmhouse,
The sun just shines on her old white head.
Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen,
Her grandsons raised the flax, and her granddaughters spun it with the distaff and the
wheel.
The melodious character of the earth,
The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go, and does not wish to go,
The justified mother of men.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Whitman begins by roaming through the human face as if it were a crowded street, a ferry crossing, and a moral panorama all at once. He notices faces marked by friendship, caution, artistry, piety, labor, desire, motherhood, violence, and damage, moving from admiration to alarm to a broader spiritual vision. The poem's first movement gathers countless outward appearances, but it also hints that no single face can be reduced to one fixed meaning.
As the poem progresses, Whitman pushes past surface toward an argument about human worth and development. He confronts faces that seem degraded, broken, or defeated, yet refuses to treat them as final truths. In the later sections, the poem turns from the grotesque and wounded toward a confident belief in hidden possibility: beneath the disguises, failures, and humiliations of life, there remains a common human dignity that will emerge in time. The closing image of the mother on the porch quietly gathers the poem's wide range into a calm, idealized presence, suggesting that ordinary life, fertility, labor, and age all participate in the same sacred continuity.
Theme
- Human diversity - Whitman presents faces as a vast gallery of difference, showing how personality, class, profession, temperament, and experience are written into the body.
- Inner worth beneath appearances - The poem keeps insisting that a face may look damaged, ugly, or distorted while still concealing a deeper, intact human essence.
- Spiritual equality - Whitman refuses to rank people by race, condition, or outward condition; all faces participate in the same divine promise.
- Growth and unfolding - Several images suggest that what is visible now is not final, and that human nature is still developing toward fuller expression.
- Compassion for suffering - Even the harshest portraits are not simply mockery; they reflect the poet's determination to look directly at pain, illness, and degradation without turning away.
- Motherhood and creation - The final section elevates the mother as a powerful emblem of nourishment, continuity, and the earth's generous creative force.
Literary Devices
- Cataloging - Whitman strings together many different faces in rapid succession, creating a sweeping democratic portrait of humanity.
- Anaphora - Repeated openings such as "This face is" and "I see" give the poem momentum and emphasize the speaker's accumulating vision.
- Metaphor - Faces are repeatedly compared to animals, objects, diseases, and natural forms, turning outward appearance into a field of symbolic meaning.
- Juxtaposition - The poem places saints, mothers, laborers, idiots, criminals, and grotesque bodies side by side to challenge easy judgments.
- Imagery - Vivid physical descriptions make the poem tactile and immediate, so that moral and spiritual ideas emerge through bodily detail.
- Hyperbole - Whitman's expansive language enlarges ordinary faces into signs of cosmic significance, fitting the poem's grand democratic ambition.
- Direct address - The second person moments create confrontation and urgency, especially when the poem challenges the reader's assumptions about finality and value.
Symbolism
- Faces - The central image stands for the visible self, but also for social identity, inner life, and the changing conditions of human existence.
- The ferry - The crossing suggests movement between states and the poet's passing observation of life in flux.
- The mother of many children - She symbolizes fertility, endurance, and the sacredness of ordinary domestic life.
- The life-boat - This image suggests rescue, guidance, and collective salvation.
- The lily - The flower represents beauty, maturity, and a kind of natural completeness.
- The asylum idiot - This figure symbolizes human brokenness while still remaining part of the larger moral community.
Tone
Whitman's tone is expansive, admiring, and morally daring, but it also becomes stern and prophetic when he confronts corruption or emptiness. He looks at people with a collector's eye and a visionary's confidence, refusing both sentimentality and disgust. The mood shifts constantly: bustling, unsettling, grim, and finally serene, as the poem moves toward a larger confidence in hidden wholeness and human sacredness.
Historical Context
Whitman wrote in the context of nineteenth-century American democracy, when writers were increasingly asking how literature could speak for ordinary people rather than only for elites. His free verse, broad catalogues, and embrace of laboring, aging, and marginalized bodies align with his larger poetic project of making American poetry spacious enough for the full range of modern life. The poem also reflects a period when questions of national identity, social equality, and spiritual meaning were being tested by rapid change.
Whitman's work belongs to the broader Romantic and transcendental tradition, but it pushes that inheritance in a more bodily and democratic direction. Instead of treating the soul as separate from the body, he finds spiritual significance in faces, gestures, health, deformity, and everyday human presence. That approach helped reshape later American poetry by legitimizing ordinary speech, ordinary bodies, and ordinary lives as worthy of high art.