ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2005. A year ago, I cited work by Laurie Anderson and Anne Sexton as writings that took on "new meaning" after the 9/11 attacks. Just recently I read an essay that identified another example, by Walt Whitman.

In the collection Rereadings (edited by bibliophile Anne Fadiman, who is scheduled to appear at the New York Public Library on September 27), Vijay Seshadri writes about revisiting Whitman's 1855 "Song of Myself" when teaching college students just after 9/11.

Not long after the line "I am the man....I suffered....I was there," Seshadri finds these lines (which, he says, were made famous by frequent quotation after 9/11, though I don't recall that):

I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken....tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired....I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have cleared the beams away....they tenderly lift me forth.
I lie in the night air in my red shirt....the pervading hush is for my sake,
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me....the heads are bared of their fire-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

Seshadri also recalls reading these lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" at a post-9/11 memorial service.

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not touch--what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

Photo: David Marc Fischer