Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” concentrates on the common American that make our nation thrive. They are the wok force that drives America forward. The repetitiveness of phrase “The _ singing” rings in my ears, creating a song in my head. I can hear the sounds of the carpenter, the woodcutter, and all the others.
The poem inspires nostalgia for those were the days when a person was specifically skilled at one job, and the products they produced were exquisite. Now, in the days of mass-manufacturing items have lost their uniqueness; everything comes out of a “cookie-cutter”.
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” reminds me of all the major choices a person has to make in life and the “what if’s” they had chosen a different path. What if the path one has taken was the wrong one? What if you can go back and re-do things? Perhaps those are questions for those that have many regrets, for it is true, once a choice or path is taken, one can rarely go back. The lines “Oh, I kept the first for another day!/Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back” (Lines 13-15) exemplify this.
I agree about the “cookie cutter”-ness of the world today. There is no uniqueness anymore especially in the mass marketing world. Whatever happened “to hand made items and customer service reps who care about our satisfaction! I am also glad to know someone else heard the singing in their head from Whitman’s poem. 🙂