O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; . . . 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 will contribute a verse.

These lines come from Whitman’s poem “O Me! O Life!” in Leaves of Grass, written in the wake of the American Civil War and first published in the 1867 edition. By then Whitman had spent years in Washington, D.C., visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals and working as a government clerk—experiences that deepened his sense of national suffering, moral disillusionment, and the fragility of individual lives amid mass society. The poem voices a recurring, almost existential self-interrogation (“What good amid these?”) and then answers with Whitman’s characteristic democratic affirmation: meaning is found not in purity of the world but in one’s living presence and participation.

The speaker confronts a bleak inventory of modern life—faithlessness, foolish crowds, and repetitive doubt—and asks what value can remain. Whitman’s answer is deliberately plain and bodily: the good is that “you are here,” that life and identity persist, and that existence itself is an ongoing “play.” The metaphor shifts despair into vocation: each person is not merely an observer of history but a contributor, responsible for adding a “verse” to the collective human story. The passage is often read as Whitman’s antidote to cynicism: meaning is not discovered in a perfected world but made through participation, creative agency, and the affirmation of one’s singular place within a larger, continuing drama.