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grandson,

Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha …

And so on; the list includes thirteen gods. Whitman was not a scholar of these things—he took most of his information from newspapers and popular novels—but his intuitive grasp was strong. He was able to flesh out an image by sensing what was still alive in it for his own purposes and experience.

In the Astor Library in New York, sometime during 1855, Whitman came across a huge compendium of etchings of Egyptian hieroglyphs and tomb carvings that had been published fifteen years previously by an Italian archaeologist. One of these etchings, reproduced here, shows a version of the resurrection of the dead Osiris. A libation is being poured over Osiris’s coffin, out of which grow twenty-eight stalks of wheat. We do not know if Whitman studied this particular drawing, but it seems likely. In 1856 he published “Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat” (later, “This Compost”), one of whose lines could serve as a caption for the drawing: “The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves…”

There are many conflicting accounts of the story of Osiris, but all agree on certain elements. Osiris was a god-king who ruled Egypt in ancient times. His brother, Set, jealous of his power, killed him by trapping him in a box and floating it down the Nile. Isis, who was both Osiris’s sister and wife, retrieved the body and brought it back to Egypt. Set found it again, however, and, tearing it apart, scattered the limbs. In some versions of the story, Isis gathered the limbs, put the body back together, and then lay with her husband to bring him back to life. In other versions, Isis took the form of a bird and flew over the earth seeking Osiris’s body. When she found it, she beat her wings so that they glowed with light and stirred up a wind; Osiris revived sufficiently to copulate with her, begetting their son, Horus.

The etchings that Whitman saw refer to a more vegetable version of the resurrection. Osiris was also a god of the crops, identified with the annual Nile flood and subsequent reappearance of the wheat. A number of reliefs have been preserved in which plants or trees grow from his dead body. In paintings and statues, Osiris is typically painted green. It was also the custom to make a figure of Osiris in grain on a mat placed inside a tomb. In the museum at Cairo there is an Osiris mummy which in ancient times was covered with linen and then kept damp so that corn actually grew on it.

“The … wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves.”

The Osiris etching that Whitman probably saw in the Astor

Library in 1855. The next year he wrote “Poem of Wonder at

The Resurrection of The Wheat.” The etching shows a

libation being poured over the dead Osiris; twenty-eight

stalks of grain sprout from the body.

Osiris is the “evergreen” principle in nature. Like the other well-known vegetation gods, he stands for what is broken, dismembered, and decayed yet returns to life with procreative power. His body is not just reassembled, it comes back green. With him we return to the mystery of things that increase as they perish—to the Tsimshian coppers cut apart at a chief’s funeral, the Kwakiutl coppers dismembered and riveted back together with increased value, Dionysos and the spirits that grow because the body is broken. And the gift as we first described it: a property that both perishes and increases. Osiris is the mystery of compost: “It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.”

I have filled out the image of this god not because Whitman necessarily knew all of these details, but because I want to give some sense of the range of inherited meaning behind “the grass over graves.” Whitman begins with “I know that my body will decay,” and through a mysterious green chemistry he ends with the new shoots of grass. And he identifies that grass with his poetry:

Scented herbage of my breast,

Leaves from you I glean, I write …,

Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above

death,