Ambiance

This poem came to mind.

Rainy wasn’t “placid and self-contained”; he was goofy, obsessive, and attached. (I suspect Whitman was thinking of a cow, a stupefied human creation.) The stallion Whitman describes later in this section of the poem, with his “eyes full of sparkling wickedness,” certainly isn’t “placid.”

But the scathing description of human behavior, that I can relate both to myself (at least the first two lines) and to the world. I was so glad to see Rainy.

~ Walt Whitman

from “Song of Myself,” 32