Journal 47: Real or Romantic

I would completely agree with the idea that Whitman was romanticizing the worker's "songs". This hard labor and no one would be happy to do it day in and day out with minimum wage. They may have a good day or two in a year but usually they go home late and exhausted. I think he was trying to encourage the society to look at the world more positively. However if I was a worker of the time I wouldn't be so happy to see Whitman, a man of a higher class, write such a poem. It may be glorifying the job that I am doing but I wouldn't appreciate Whitman's idealization of the hard work and making it sound all joyous. The workers would be more sad than cheerful. I don't the would celebrate as much as Whitman does for them in his poem. The poem makes the whole situation sound too good. People go to work everyday in hard labor and only sing work songs to make it go by faster or make the the job seem easier. All in all I think that Whitman wasn't trying to make things over idealized but he was just trying to honor the american workers as heroes. He wanted all of America to see what the workers were doing for the country without complaint.