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By Root 870 0

object is definitely sexual now, and if only because sexual identity is so deeply felt (especially for one who claims to have “receiv’d identity by [his] body”), both the attraction and the fear are heightened—the singing voice is both honey and poison. He must choose: will he risk admitting what is clearly foreign into the self or will he erect a protective armor and close himself off? Is this woman’s song a gift to be refused? It is at this point in the poem that Whitman pauses to define “being”; the entrance of the soprano’s voice is followed immediately by the lines, already quoted, which equate being alive with allowing the objects of the world to pass through the self. The living self accepts the frailty of sympathy. “To be in any form, what is that? / … Mine is no callous shell …” Whitman does not deny his hesitancy and fear, but in the end he opens the skin, accepting what is a poison to particular identity so as to receive a higher sweetness for the durable self.

The scene with the opera singer is quickly followed by the strongest of the three moments of tension between the old and the new identity. Whitman has been drawn to the sea and to a woman heard from a distance. Now he says, “To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand.” Again, something fearful but inviting overtakes him. He describes the entry in terms of a betrayal by his senses: normally, it seems, his senses act as guards protecting the borders of the self—they let some things enter, they stop others. But when he touches this person, “touch” takes over and he is possessed, both by his own desire and by the lover.

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,

Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help

them,

My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what

is hardly different from myself,

On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,

Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,

Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,

Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,

Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,

Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight

and pasture-fields,

Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,

They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at

the edges of me,

No consideration, no regard for my draining strength

or my anger, …

I am given up by traitors,

I talk wildly, I have lost my wits …

As before, there is something threatening to the particular identity in this fusion with what is foreign to the self. But a new and necessary detail is now added: this time the sensual reception of the other leads toward new life. He is “quiver[ed]… to a new identity”; the panicky union leads to these calmer declarations:

Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of

perpetual loan,

Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific

and vital,

Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

There is a cycle: new identity follows the old. With these “sprouts” we have arrived at Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay.

•••

Whitman’s grass almost always appears over a grave. His invocation is not “O grass” but “O grass of graves.” The two are constantly connected, from the beginning of the poem where a child asks, “What is grass?” and Whitman’s associations soon lead him to death (“And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves”), to the end of the poem where he describes his own eventual grave with its “leafy lips.”

This distinctive vein of Whitman’s poetry comes, I imagine, out of a meditation on the following brief sentence recorded in his earliest journal: “I know that my body will decay.” No fixed identity can relax in the face of this knowledge. Once it has entered our consciousness, that part of us which takes identity seriously will begin to search