As science continues to indicate, all life forms derive from the same ancestral single cell, and our body is “stucco’d. When we are born, Whitman suggests, we emerge with a human body that has in less than a year retraced evolution, and we “can call any thing back again” when we desire it-all the organic things that we “incorporate,” from moss to fruit to birds and quadrupeds. Humans all begin life as a zygote, a one-celled creature, then grow in some compressed nine-month evolution from that one cell to a small creature with gills and a tail, living immersed in a liquid environment: gestation is a compressed evolution, so at some level every human has experienced life as a single cell, life as an aquatic creature. Evolution does not culminate in humans rather we humans are but one of that vast accumulation of life forms. As he delights in the sights, sounds, aromas, tastes, and touches of the things of the world, he realizes that his human body is not only the result of vast evolutionary changes through eons of time but is part of an ongoing, nonstop process of an endless proliferation of life in an infinite variety of forms.
Now, in this section, Whitman accomplishes something never before attempted: he captures what it is like to inhabit an evolved body. As we have seen, one of Whitman’s great accomplishments in “Song of Myself” is to capture in language what it is like to live in a body, to experience the ways our senses absorb the vast multiplicity of the world.
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