Leaves of Grass 5

The city sleeps and the country sleeps, / The living sleep for their time....the dead sleep for their time, / The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife / And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am.

Importance
This section follows an extremely long section about people doing things that typically relate to their identity (eg prostitutes dragging their clothing and a crowd of men laughing at them). Because each of the people described his completely unrelated to the previous person, this section is totally different. Whitman instead talks about people in relation to each other and the connectedness that binds them. Because the structure and theme is so different, the reader is forced to pay closer attention to it and that emphasizes Whitman's intention.

Analysis
Whitman utilizes parallel structure to give more emphasis to the connectedness of the humans he is describing. Instead of the random descriptions of human activity, these people are all bound by the common thread of humanity. In the last line, Whitman says "And such as it is to be of these more or less I am". By directly addressing himself, Whitman is no longer an independent observer but instead a part of them as well. Whitman also revisits the topic of life and death. Because the dead "sleep for a time", he is again denying that death is permanent. By saying the same thing in relation to life, he is also denying that life is permanent, showing the inherent equality of the two states.