The World Below the Brine

World Below the Brine – Analysis

‘World Below the Brine’ by Walt Whitman is a poem about the world that exists underneath the surface of the water. Whitman takes parts of nature that we have upon land and places them in the sea, ‘forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves’, he’s taking the things that we are familiar with and placing them in the different setting of the sea as to make the scene he creates more clear. He transforms land based aspects of nature and imagine a sea-version of it, for example, taking lettuce and thinking of the underwater version as ‘sea-lettuce’. ‘Vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle opening and pink turf’, Whitman pictures everything on land and combines it with the sea. ‘Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, on slowly crawling close the bottom’ describes the sea creature slowly swimming ‘suspended’ and sinking low to the bottom. The following two lines depict the animals in the sea, comparing some again to versions we have on land. All of the first eight lines are describing the ‘world below the brine’ but then from the ninth, Whitman begins to think of the world as an actual place of life, where ‘wars, pursuits, tribes’ all occur, just as they do in our world. He begins to write about the ‘brine’ world as a place where the animals would also have their own type of laws, societies, and civilizations. They would have a different way of breathing and living compared to the version we, as humans, know. Whitman writes about other worlds as different spheres, telling us that there are differences between all ‘spheres’.

        This poem is different from the others I chose to be in my anthology because the rest all focus on one animal, although others may be mentioned. In ‘World Below the Brine’, Whitman describes an entirely new world that involves animals as to still be on the required topic. I like this poem because it shows you an entirely different viewpoint on other ‘spheres’, which in this case would be the underwater one.