And as we go through life, we are never “contain’d between” our hats and our boots we are instead a dynamic, ever-shifting group of atoms physically and a dynamic, ever-shifting group of perceptions mentally. Each of us is literally made up of “dead” matter, of the atoms of previous lives that have been recirculated to produce us. We are all, as he will say later in the poem, “the leavings of many deaths,” just as we all are the seedbeds of many births. Section 7 begins with one of Whitman’s most audacious boasts: if you think it’s “lucky to be born,” then, he is quick to let us know, “it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” How does he know it is lucky to die? By this point in the poem, Whitman has convinced us that these atoms belonging to us, composing us, did not originate with us but in fact have been circulating through the universe from the beginning of time and will be circulating until the end of time.
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