私は草 / I am the Grass

Take this essay I wrote about Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself (Section 6)”. It got a 4.5/5, because I made many tiny mistakes, but it's still pretty good.


Link to the poem: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html

I am the Grass, Let Me Work

There is no doubt that grass is one of the most common things found in nature. It is a simple plant that grows almost everywhere. Grass is often associated with nature, and as such, has connotative meanings relating to life. However, in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself (Section 6)”, Whitman makes several points about both the process of life and the process death by relating them to grass.

Section 6 of “Song of Myself” begins with a child asking “What is the grass?” (Whitman, 1). The persona is baffled by the question; he admits that he does not “…know what it is any more than he.” (Whitman, 2). These beginning two lines have set the foundation that the reader should think beyond the denotative meaning of grass; it is not just a green plant that grows on our lawns.

Whitman starts his comparison of grass to the cycle of life with a metaphor and an allusion to God. The persona claims that grass “…is the handkerchief of the Lord” (Whitman, 4). A handkerchief is a piece of cloth used to wipe clean the mouth after a meal or to blow your nose with. But why would God need such a trivial item? This metaphor is a way to delineate that the grass does the work of God; it essentially cleans up the dead so that new living things can thrive.

Right after relating the grass to death, the persona then uses another metaphor to compare the grass to a child, “…the produced babe of the vegetation” (Whitman, 7). Children, like nature, have connotative meanings relating to life. A child is also innocent in the sense that they are new to the world and that there is still much for them to learn. Therefore, it is no coincidence that it was a child who posed the initial question “What is the grass?”

As the poem progresses, Whitman shifts to a more grim perspective of the grass, and the connotations of death become more apparent. In stanza eight, the persona ponders the origin of the grass, and what kind of people might have been buried under it. The reader is presented with a morbid thought that the grass may be “…from offspring take soon out of their / mothers’ laps,” (Whitman, 16-17). However, Whitman ends the stanza with a positive point: “And here you are the mothers’ laps.” 
(Whitman, 18). Whitman once again juxtaposes life and death in this stanza; grass may grow on the dead, but grass itself harbours life.

As an aside, Whitman has not been the only poet to associate grass with death. Carl Sandburg’s “Grass” was written after World War I and shares a similar view about the topic. Two lines in particular are of interest in Sandburg’s poem: “I am the grass; I cover all” (Sandburg, 3), and “I am the grass. / Let me work.” (Sandburg 10-11). The first line suggests that the grass covers all the buried bodies from the war. The war victims may have died of different reasons, but in the end their bodies end up in the soil like the rest of the deceased. The second line’s message is simply stating that grass growing is a natural process, and it shouldn’t be questioned.

Going back to Whitman’s “Song of Myself (Section 6)”, the similarities to Sandburg’s “Grass” can be seen in the final stanza. Whitman ends the poem by stating “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier” (Whitman, 31-32). Similar to the ending of “Grass”, Whitman’s message is that death is a natural process and it shouldn’t be questioned. Grass does not stop growing if one blade of it is cut. Likewise, the world does not stop moving if one person dies. The final line of Section 6 of “Song for Myself” is left as an enigma for the readers to interpret. However, the main point to take from this poem is that although death may be melancholic, it gives rise to life, the most precious thing in the world.