Here are the results of my own in-class “free write” on "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life":

Whitman’s need to rename things & to call them “by their nighest name,” so that he can address them as “You”—“you fish-shaped island,” “you up there, whoever you are”. . . according to Jonathan Culler, this manner of naming is designed to identify the speaker more than the object addressed. It announces the speaker as someone who can speak to islands, to the unborn & the dead, to abstract concepts. In short, it announces him or her as a poet: “Invocation,” Culler writes (that is, the act of calling upon something, inviting it to speak or appear), “is vocation,” the sign that the poet him or herself has been called upon to speak.

(...in my defense, I spent most of the time allotted preparing for the next exercise)