"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? ....I do not know what it is any more than he."
I found this section of the poem to be quite powerful. Though Whitman at times acts all knowing, this section displays him question the world and proving that he doesn't know any more than a child does about the workings and mysteries of nature. When Whitman can't come up with a straight answer as to what grass is, he comes up with a collection of metaphorical answers to the child's question, even mentioning that grass is a child of vegetation.
The name of the poem undoubtedly takes from this passage and says a lot about the poem itself. That while Whitman may know a lot about writing and the workings of people and their social habitations, he may never know the answers to the questions of nature and God. To Whitman leaves of grass are just metaphors for a thousand other things that he can answer, but he will never be able to answer what exactly the grass is.
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ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you. I also like this line because it sort of makes you stop for a second. You don't often think about "what is the grass". Grass is just...grass, right? But Whitman reminds us how much we really don't know.
ReplyDeleteGood choice! :)
I love how Whitman uses the perspective of a child to look at the metaphor of grass. The way a child views the world is beautifully different than the way an adult does; It is disjunct from adult worries and is free to wander into weird thoughts. When a child shows you a caterpillar (or some other thing like a leaf or something) for the first time, they are literally experiencing it for the first time and that little nugget of life is astounding. An adult would roll his/her eyes and say something like, "yea okay that is not at all special (and you child are the smallest idiot I have ever met...)" But most adults realize this disconnect and embrace it. Children ask the most insightful questions without meaning for them to be insightful and this is part of the power of a child; they can draw awareness to the things we as adults can't see. We have become so numb and so driven to "succeed" that it takes a little creature that wants to know about grass (the most mundane given light of significance by a child's question) to realize how insightful the question is.
ReplyDeleteI think that Whitman's ramblings about what the grass might be are the some of the most beautiful lines in the poem: "I guess it must be the flag of my disposition out of hopeful green stuff woven" (Song of Myself, section 6, line 5) or "a handkerchief of the Lord" (Song of Myself, section 6, line 7). Wow. The fact that his ponderings on this bring him to the decision that "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/ And to die is different from what any one supposed,/ and luckier. What's that, Walt? Luckier? Whitman's ideas of death and that it should not be feared abound in "Song of Myself" and I believe the first notion of this starts at the end of this very important section about the grass. Something to explore further. Thanks for the post that got me thinking about this!
ReplyDeleteExcellent comments here! And a very nice post. Grass is common yet necessary. And, I think W's challenge here is to show us how the grass can be BOTH common and special, both identical and yet also different.
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