Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a self-published text which was often revised throughout the nineteenth century. His poem “Song of Myself” was Whitman’s naïve yet ambitious method of trying to prevent the Civil War, which also portrayed life, death and their meanings. “Song of Myself” offers insight to the issues of the world during the period of the Civil War and Walt Whitman becomes a universal teacher to address these issues. Passage 47 of the poem “Song of Myself”, an important section of this poem explains the core of Whitman’s teachings that envelop the entire poem. Walt Whitman focuses on three major principles that create the foundation of his “philosophy”: hard work, experience and equality. A combination of these three principles create a nation.
To begin, passage 47 of “Song of Myself” explains Whitman’s role in this text. Whitman’s role in this text is to be a teacher and his students are the readers. 
In short, Whitman immediately declares himself as a teacher. He proves his strength through his students. For example, the students who surpass Whitman show the competence of Whitman as a teacher because the students grow to become even better people. 
Basically, Whitman is explaining that he dislikes people who are pampered. Instead, Whitman appreciates people who work hard. His ideas or mainly, his “philosophy” is that people who work hard will accomplish their goals. 
 In brief, Whitman explains that he wants his students to choose their own path, but his ideas will be guiding them through whichever path they choose. These paths are decisions that people make for their future. The foundation for these decisions is Walt Whitman.
However, Whitman begins inviting the readers to be his students from the end of passage two. 

In short, Whitman is asking the reader to learn from him. By learning from Whitman, the reader will gain more knowledge and have open perception. However, the reader will not imitate Whitman, but instead use him as a guide. As cited earlier, the student learns from the teacher to destroy him. By learning from Whitman, one may take in all information, but leave it to interpretation to extract the knowledge. Whitman wants the readers to experience life for themselves and gain their own knowledge. By doing so, the student will be able to destroy the teacher. Experience is one of the requirements for a society to become a nation. Without failures, there will not be achievements and without achievements, the nation will not prevail.

To put it differently, Whitman is animating these objects because they are tools that require heavy labor. The tools “second” his words because these tools have also gone through hard work and know what hard work is. Whitman tends to use I very freely because he thinks he is everything. 

In essence, the “me” in this passage is an allegory of Whitman himself as well as his ideas. Whitman becomes a universal symbol and is everywhere, like god. The young mechanic and the woodman “takes” Whitman with them as they go to work, which really means they are hard workers and Whitman appreciates these hard working people. The farm boy feels good hearing Whitman’s voice because he is taking Whitman’s ideas with him to work, and through hard work, the farm boy will become a man. A nation cannot become a nation by doing nothing. Whitman is trying to teach people that everyone specializes in a certain skill, therefore becoming useful to the nation. Everyone is different, yet everyone is equal. They are different because of their different skills, but equal because they are working equally hard to contribute to the nation.
