Specimen Days: Sunday With The Insane

        What a title. I'll name a song I make "Sunday With The Insane" one of these days.
        Whitman writes about his visit to an Insane Asylum, and specifically the religious services that were held on the premises. He says about 300 people were in attendance for the services, and that most of them were patients. He was mostly surprised by the audience, comprised of many “insane” persons, and how calm and focused they seemed to be.
        Whitman doesn’t say it, but he expected the patients to be acting a little more… insane. He looks at them in a sort of amazement. He feels that it may be the “peace of god” that transcends different levels of understanding different people may have of the world (I.e. transcending whatever abnormalities these people had in their minds). He reminds himself that humanity is common among all, with the quote “The same old blood -- the same red, running blood;”… Though Walt wrote of the common humanity in many of his poems, here he shows how his own preconceived notions about the differences in humans superseded his openness to seeing that common humanity in everyone. He shows his amazement that he may, in fact, be right about our common humanity.