Ten of this poem's twelve lines begin with the same word, "Unfolded," and the repetition works like a hammer. Whitman takes a familiar picture of human greatness and turns it around. Every quality we admire in a man, whether strength, friendliness, justice or even poetry, is traced back to a woman who possessed it first. The poem's claim is blunt: "every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman."
The key word is doing more than one job. To be "unfolded" is to be born, to develop, and to be revealed, like cloth opened out or a letter read. The "folds" of the first line suggest the body of the mother, but by line eight the word has become almost scientific: "Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain, come all the folds of the man's brain." The wrinkled surface of the brain really is a set of folds, so the image is both a metaphor and a physical fact. The stray phrase "duly obedient" adds a flicker of dry humour, as if the son's brain were politely following the mother's pattern.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from parallel structure, in which a quality in the woman is matched by the same quality in the man: "the friendliest woman" gives "the friendliest man," and "the perfect body of a woman" gives a man "of perfect body." The word "only" keeps tightening the claim until it sounds almost legalistic. The lines are long enough to wrap and indent on the page, which gives them a rolling, chant-like motion. Whitman also coins "superbest," a double superlative that shows his love of excess, as though ordinary "best" couldn't carry his enthusiasm. The sequence climbs from body ("perfect body") to mind ("brain") to morality ("justice," "sympathy"), and the colon after "sympathy" holds the poem's breath before the turn.
The speaker steps in personally, too. The parenthesis "(only thence have my poems come;)" ties the poet himself to the argument, and the archaic "thence" gives it the weight of a formal declaration. Then come "the strong and arrogant woman I love" and "the strong and arrogant man I love." The same verb and the same adjectives cover both sexes. The woman here is no fragile figure. She is "brawny" and "well-muscled," and her "embraces" are active and physical. Judging by this language, Whitman wants to praise woman's power, not only her gentleness, and "arrogant" is plainly meant as a compliment.
The ending is the cleverest part. "A man is a great thing upon the earth, and through eternity" sounds like conventional pride, but the dash and the "but" cut it down at once. "Jot," a tiny unit, suggests an accounting in which no portion of male greatness goes unexplained. The final line is quiet and short after the long run of repetition: "First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself." It carries a small paradox. A person's ability to make himself depends on having first been made by someone else. Independence turns out to begin in dependence.
The poem matters because it refuses to treat the female body as lesser. It calls that body "perfect" and the woman an "inimitable poem," and it makes birth the foundation for intelligence, ethics and art. A reader might see it as a reversal of the old story in which woman is drawn from man's rib, though that is an interpretation, not something the poem states. A modern reader may also notice a limit. The poem still measures woman largely by what she produces, namely man, and its subject remains "the greatness of man." Even so, its energy lies in making that greatness a borrowed one, and the repeated "Unfolded" makes the debt impossible to overlook.