Both involve a loss of balance. In section 28, the protagonist loses bodily balance as he is swept away by an erotic, masturbatory urge. Ask the students to think about why a masturbation fantasy occurs in a poem about democracy. Ask them to think about why the masturbatory fit is represented in the language of political insurrection. These questions lead to interesting observations about the relation between political power and power over the body.
Masturbation is, in effect, the political ground on which Whitman tests the theory of democracy.
Within the democratic economy of his poem, the turbulence of the body, like the turbulence of the masses, is part of a natural regenerative order. If section 28 involves a loss of bodily balance, section 38 involves a loss of self in empathetic identification with others. This will usually lead back to the end of section 3, where the poet begins identifying with scenes of suffering, carnage, and death. The poet appears to be on the verge of losing faith in the divine potency of the individual and the regenerative pattern of the whole. He resolves the crisis by remembering the divinity of Christ as a living power existing within rather than outside of every individual.