Long Way to Whitman

I found one of my favourite poems while looking for an Instagram bio.

I know exactly how that sounds. But it's true, and I won't dress it up as anything more dignified than it was, because the story only holds together if I tell it honestly.

I'd been stuck for weeks on four words meant to summarize me, which is an absurd task to begin with. So I did what most people quietly do now — opened chapgpt, typed a few loose facts about myself, and asked it to hand something back.

Most of what it gave me was instantly forgettable. But one line stayed with me longer than the rest:

"The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."

It didn't feel unfamiliar. It felt recovered, like something I already knew but had misplaced the source of. I looked it up expecting nothing notable. Instead I found Walt Whitman, a poem called "O Me! O Life!" — and the exact line that had stopped me was the one spoken aloud in Dead Poets Society, my favourite film. I had heard it before. I simply hadn't known where from.

Whitman doesn't build up to his point gradually — the poem opens already deep in complaint. He lists, almost without pause, the questions that keep recurring, the faithlessness around him, cities full of foolishness, years spent and wasted before anyone noticed. It reads like a grievance given form, one clause after another, until it collapses into a single plain question: what good amid these, O me, O life?

Then, in two lines, it answers itself. Not by resolving the list. Not by disputing any of it. It simply states that you exist, that your life exists alongside you, and that this larger, ongoing arrangement — the "powerful play" — was always going to continue whether you took part in it or not. Participation was never required. But it is available, if you choose it.

I once came across a line on an Instagram reel — I know, I should be watching fewer of these — that has stayed with Whitman's line ever since: you cannot be behind on your own life, because it was never running on anyone else's timeline.There is no earlier version of you already further along. There is no schedule to fail to meet.

In the film, Mr. Keating makes essentially the same case to his students, without softening it. He tells them that medicine, law, business, and engineering are necessary — they keep a life functioning. But poetry, beauty, romance, love are what a life is actually for. He isn't dismissing the practical. He's separating what sustains a life from what gives it purpose. Then he hands Whitman's line back to them directly: the play continues regardless of what they decide — so what will their verse be?

That scene was the first thing that made me look inward instead of simply forward. Nothing dramatic happened. I didn't quit anything or have some late-night reckoning. It was quieter — the first time I asked what I actually wanted, rather than accepting what came next by default. The honest answer was reading, and writing. It wasn't the path I had carefully constructed for myself that kept pulling at my attention. It was what I kept returning to whenever no one was asking anything of me. That was my verse, sitting quietly beneath everything else I was occupied building.

It's strange, in hindsight, that I rediscovered the poem through a machine generating disposable text for a bio no one would read twice. The same idea that once pulled me out of autopilot arrived, this time, through autopilot itself — a tool built for speed handing back, almost incidentally, the one thought that has only ever pulled me toward slowing down.

I don't think that's ironic so much as it's simply how ideas travel now. The medium changes; the idea underneath doesn't. Whitman never wrote for Instagram, and Keating never taught for chatbots, but the line outlasted both, because it was never really about how it arrived. It was never really about the play either. What matters is the second half of the line — you may contribute a verse. Not you must. Not you will. May — an offer, not an obligation. The choice simply waits, for whoever wants to take it.

I did find my bio, eventually. It reads: "and the powerful play goes on."

Here is the poem in full, the way Whitman set it down — because some things were written to be read whole, not borrowed a line at a time:

Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?                                        Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

July 6, 2026 | UTSC