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By Root 814 0

for a way of being which could include the fact of death and decay. In the same notebook, Whitman wrote a fragmentary phrase: “Different objects which decay, and by the chemistry of nature, their bodies are [changed?] into spears of grass.” “Song of Myself” is an attempt to replicate this chemistry. In the poem the grass usually appears after something has entered, and altered, the self. The scenes we have just reviewed, the “sprouts” that follow touch, are a good example (or, earlier, Whitman sees the grass for the first time, its “leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,” immediately following his epiphany). Whitman wishes to demonstrate that the self replicates or participates in that chemistry of nature which changes decayed bodies into spears of grass.

At one point in Leaves of Grass Whitman speaks of the compost of decay: “It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.” In “Song of Myself” the grass itself speaks: “Growing among black folks as among white, / … I give them the same, I receive them the same.” As the grass is food for animal life, so we animals, with the death of the body, become food for the grass. It accepts what we bestow upon it, then gives itself away. But this, of course, is also how Whitman pictures the gifted self. When it identifies with “the grass over graves,” therefore, the self assumes an identity harmonious with its own process in the gifted state. The self that identifies with a cycle of gifts takes its own activity as its identity—not the reception of objects, not the bestowal of particular contents, but the entire process, the respiration, the give-and-take of sympathy and pride. And “the grass over graves” therefore comes to stand for more than enduring life in Whitman’s cosmology. It stands for the creative self, the singing self. Not only does the grass sprout from the grave, but it speaks; it is “so many uttering tongues” emerging from “the faint red roofs” of the mouths of the dead.

In accepting the decay of the body, the impermanence of identity, and the permeability of the self, Whitman finds his voice. His tongue comes to life in the grave and begins its song. Or perhaps we should not say “grave,” but “threshold,” for at the moment of change we cannot well distinguish between birth and death:

And as to you Death … it is idle to try to alarm me.

To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes, I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting, I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors, And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

The “accoucheur” is a midwife or obstetrician, so these “doors” are both an entrance to the grave and an exit from the womb. “The new-born emerging from gates and the dying emerging from gates,” says another poem. Whitman addresses us from this gate or doorway: “From the cinderstrew’d threshold I follow their movements …”; “I wait on the door-slab.” The poems appear in the frame of the flexible doors, and they themselves are the leaves of grass, threshold gifts uttered from the still-point where life both rises and falls, where identity forms and perishes.

The grass over graves is a very old image, of course; Whitman did not invent it. Vegetation has always been taken as a sign of indestructible life, and the vegetable gods of antiquity were its personification. I discussed Dionysos in an earlier chapter; Osiris is the other good example, the one with which Whitman seems to have been acquainted. A friend of his once recounted that Whitman as a young man living in New York “paraded on Broadway with a red shirt on, open in front …, and compared himself with Christ and Osiris.” Later, in the 1850s, visitors to Whitman’s room in his mother’s house would find a group of unframed pictures pasted on the wall—Hercules, Dionysos or Bacchus, and a satyr. Whitman apparently used to meditate on images of the gods, trying to imagine them present in himself, or trying to speak with their voices. In “Song of Myself” we read:

Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,

Lithographing Kronos,