Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.

This line opens Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road,” first published in the 1856 edition of *Leaves of Grass* and later revised across subsequent editions. Whitman wrote during a period of rapid territorial expansion, democratizing rhetoric, and heightened mobility in the United States; the “open road” becomes a distinctly American emblem of movement, possibility, and self-making. Biographically, Whitman cultivated a public persona of the robust, wandering poet—attuned to ordinary people and the nation’s physical spaces—so the poem’s confident departure reads as both literal travel and a symbolic setting-out into democratic fellowship and experience.

Whitman frames freedom as a bodily and spiritual condition: “afoot” and “lighthearted” suggest unencumbered motion, while “healthy, free” links physical vitality to moral and civic independence. The “open road” is not merely a route but a philosophy of life—embracing uncertainty, rejecting constraint, and meeting the world directly. By placing “the world before me” at the end, Whitman emphasizes forward-looking possibility and self-trust; the speaker claims agency and welcomes encounter. The line also signals Whitman’s democratic ideal: the road is open to all, and the journey implies companionship, shared experience, and continual becoming rather than fixed identity.

1) “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,”
2) “Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,”