Miracles

Literary Commentary

Walt Whitman's "Miracles," first published in 1856 as "Poem of Perfect Miracles," is a three-stanza free-verse argument disguised as a list. Rather than dispute whether supernatural events are real, the speaker enlarges the word miracle until everything ordinary fits inside it. A walk on the beach, a streetcar of strangers, a honey-bee in summer — each gets the same word, and the same weight, as the new moon.

The arrangement is the argument. The long opening stanza moves from Manhattan streets to roofs and sky, to bare feet at the water's edge, to woods, to a loved one in conversation or sleep, to strangers riding opposite, to bees and animals and birds, and finally to sundown, stars, and the new moon's thin curve. Public scenes sit beside private ones; human company sits beside insect company; cosmos sits beside streetcar. Whitman's catalogue refuses hierarchy — and by refusing it, makes a democratic claim before it makes a religious one.

The poem then contracts. The middle stanza generalizes — "Every cubic inch of space is a miracle" — and the closing tercet narrows to the sea, which the speaker addresses as a single "continual miracle." The poem ends by returning to the question it opened with: "What stranger miracles are there?" The answer the catalogue has already given is that there are no stranger ones, only this one — repeated everywhere, in every direction the eye turns.

Key themes

• The sacredness of the ordinary
• Democracy of attention
• Body and world as continuous
• Nature and city held in one frame
• The sea as figure for unbounded continuity

Notable craft elements

• Catalogue structure built on anaphora — "Or" through the long opening stanza, "Every" through the second
• Free verse modeled on biblical parallelism rather than accentual-syllabic meter
• Three uneven stanzas — sixteen lines, then four, then three — closing with the shape of a wave receding
• A question-and-answer frame: the poem opens and closes by asking what a miracle is

Reread prompt

On a second reading, watch the order of images in the long first stanza. Why is the streetcar full of strangers placed where it is, and what would change if Whitman had moved it to the end of the catalogue?

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