Most prayers ask one God for something. Whitman's "Gods" does the opposite: it keeps choosing a new God, again and again, and the choices get larger and stranger as the poem goes on. The speaker begins with "the Infinite—the All," then turns to a "Lover Divine," an "Ideal Man," Death, and finally to everything from "great Ideas" to "Time and Space." The central idea is that the divine is not one fixed figure but whatever lifts the soul out of what confines it. The plural title announces this before the first line.
The poem's structure is simple and strongly marked. It is built from seven numbered sections, and most end with the same short line, "Be thou my God." That refrain gives the poem the feel of a litany, a prayer in which one phrase returns while the requests change. The sections also grow. The first is only two lines, the third and the last two are four and five lines long, and the poem seems to gather momentum as it goes. Then, in the sixth section, the refrain itself changes, and "Be thou" becomes "Be ye my Gods!" The speaker has been addressing single figures, and now there are crowds of them. The seventh section keeps the plural, and the poem ends on a roll call of the universe.
There is no rhyme anywhere. Whitman is known for free verse, and the music here comes from repetition and from the loose, speech-like rhythm of lines that vary in length. The long, spreading lines ("Complete in Body, and dilate in Spirit") contrast with the short, firm refrain, which works like a beat the poem keeps coming back to. Whitman also leans on the word "Or" in the last two sections: "Or thee, Old Cause," "Or Time and Space!" "Or shape of Earth." It makes the poem sound open-minded, as if the speaker is saying that any of these could be a God and refusing to rank them.
The imagery moves from the abstract to the physical. At first the gods are things you cannot see. The "Lover Divine" is "invisible yet, but certain," a phrase that sounds like faith waiting for proof. The Ideal Man is described through the body as well as the spirit, "Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving," and the word "content" returns from the previous section, as though the speaker's picture of perfection is a calm one. By the end, the divine is concrete and visible: the "shape of Earth," the "lustrous orb of Sun," the "star by night." Even the speaker is included, since one of the possible gods is a "shape in I myself." That small phrase shows how daring the poem is. Worship is not kept for something far above the self, and the speaker allows that he might find the divine in himself.
The most surprising choice is Death, which comes in the fourth section. The parenthesis "(for Life has served its turn;)" is flat and almost calm, and Death is called "Opener and usher to the heavenly mansion." Death appears here as a doorkeeper who shows you in, with none of the usual terror. The soul is also a recurring concern. In the fifth and sixth sections the speaker wants "to break the stagnant tie" and to "free, O Soul" the self, and the gods in the sixth section are defined by what they do: "All that exalts, releases thee, my Soul!" The test of a god is whether it sets the soul loose, and that includes the "heroisms, deeds of rapt enthusiasts" of human history. The word "stagnant" suggests that the opposite of worship is being stuck.
The poem matters because it widens the idea of what a prayer can be. A speaker who can say "Be thou my God" to Death, to an idea, to a star and to himself is treating reverence as something to be practised everywhere, not stored in one building or one name. The poem does not argue for this. It enacts it, by letting the refrain pull in more and more of the world until the list seems to have no end. That makes it a good poem to read slowly, and perhaps to ask what you would add to the list.