In Section 49 of “Song of Myself,” the Whitman persona marvels at a body that can know the acute sensory experience of giving birth, pain merging into the pleasure of expulsion, the ultimate orgasm, as the persona watches a childbirth. He lies next to the woman, close, in a way like present-day practice in which the male shares in the birthing experience as much as he can. The persona speaks:

To a reader familiar with Whitman's images and the valorization of the concepts that these images inscribe, the terms “doors,” “sills,” and “flexible” signal concepts and characteristics that coalesce into primary motifs in his work - the possibility of beginning anew and the strength gained through an inclusive or expansive point of view. Here, female genitalia image these concepts, the phrase “sills of the exquisite flexible doors” possessing an evocative power that critics have not usually associated with Whitman's images of female sexuality. The word “vulva,” if traced back far enough, has as one of its derivations “the leaf of a door” (the leaf-door, i.e., the flexibility of a folding door).