Are you the new person drawn toward me?

“Are you the new person drawn toward me?” is a single-stanza poem of nine lines. There is no rhyme scheme in this particular Whitman poem, and the line lengths vary between longer and shorter lines. The first three lines shift from shorter, to longer, to shorter, as do the next three lines. However, the last three lines get progressively shorter. The line lengths can be drastically different from one another, and there doesn’t seem to be any significance to the line lengths other than the fact that each line ends with a hard stop, a form of end punctuation, that allows the line to stand alone as a comprehensive thought. Just as there is no rhyme scheme or set form, there is also no set meter in the poem. The stressed and unstressed syllables in each line vary significantly from one another, with no repetitive sequence. This gives the poem a conversational feel, as if the speaker were speaking “naturally” to the addressee rather than in any affected manner. Since there is no rhyme scheme or meter in the poem, Whitman’s work can technically be labeled as