by Lewis Hyde
Whitman is not logically rigorous in his use of “self” and “identity,” but these generalizations offer an approximate beginning. I introduce them because there is a middle phase in the process of the gifted self: between sympathy and pride, between the reception and the bestowal, lies a moment in which new identity comes to life as old identity perishes. A sequence of three of these moments marks the center of “Song of Myself.” In each, Whitman calls on some outer object or person to enter or merge with him, beginning with the sea:
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting
fingers, …
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you … Sea beating broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves, …
I am integral with you …
Here is the first hint of the death that lies in Whitman’s sympathy. The water of contact is a soporific, the amorous wet is full of graves. A line in the first edition speaks of a pain accompanying the fusion: “We hurt each other as the bride groom and the bride hurt each other.” Old identity breaks to receive the new. The new may simply replace the old or, as in this figure, old identity may fuse with the outer object, a marriage, new flesh.
The fear, pain, and confusion of this integration is more marked in the next of these three moments. This time Whitman invokes sound; the catalog of what he hears ends with a woman singing in the opera:
I hear the trained soprano … she convulses me like the
climax of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me … I dab with bare feet … they are licked by
the indolent waves,
I am exposed … cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine … my windpipe
squeezed in the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And what we call Being.
The outer 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 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, Zeus his son, and Hercules his
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,
… O the winter shall not freeze you delicate leaves,
Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you shall emerge again … *
The self becomes gifted when it identifies with a commerce of gifts and the gifted self is prolific. In nature the Osiris-force is the resurrection of the wheat; in a commerce of gifts it is the increase; in the gifted self it is creativity, and for a poet, in particular, it is original speech.
Whitman says that “the inmost secrets of art” sleep between sympathy and pride. We have so far addressed him primarily by the first of these terms, sympathy, the receptive phase of his imagination. Objects approach and enter the permeable self, giving it identity—or, rather, a sequence of identities, for the old perishes as the new enters. Particular identity is dismembered, the particular body decays. But the self is not lost, new “sprouts take and accumulate.” With them we come to the second pole of Whitman’s art, the assertion of an active, autonomous, and idiosyncratic being. By “pride” Whitman means not haughtiness but something closer to self-confidence. Animals are proud in this sense, “so placid and self-contained …, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins …” The proud are those who accept their being as sufficient and justified. The proud man, in Whitman’s constantly repeated image, is he who will not remove his hat for any person, institution, or custom. Whitman himself used to wear his hat in the house.
Pride is not antithetical to sympathy, but it is selective. “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” counsels Whitman in the voice of pride. When pride is active, Whitman’s sympathy has only what the mystics call a “selective surrender.” Some things must be denied admission to the core of his being. Earlier we saw his senses surrender him to a lover; they reappear later as the
agents of pride, and the result is different:
You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
