self.” He appears confounded that the same grassy earth that swallows up
“distempered corpses” can, paradoxically, “be alive with the growths of
spring.” How can this earth, the source of health and sustenance, digest
“all the foul liquid and meat” that have been buried in it, he wonders. In
this terri¤ed mood he decides to avoid all contact with the earth:
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now to the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my ®esh to the earth or to other ®esh to
renew me.Yet this rejectionist mood does not last. In one of those abrupt shifts
that characterizes almost all of Whitman’s poems that begin with a de-
spairing view of his world, the persona’s revulsion against decay and pes-
tilence is replaced in the second part of the poem by a sudden revelation
that the same earth that is the repository of offal and death is simultane-
ously the inexhaustible source of health and fruitfulness—a theme akin
to the Ceres myth. The persona ¤rst exclaims, “Behold this compost!
behold it well!” But then he perceives the earth’s cyclic regeneration and
renewal as symbols of the miracle of existence and the deathlessness of
the human spirit. Then (in the imagery of birthing that often occurs in
those poems that are concerned with death) he sensuously enumerates
the emergent growths—the grass, the trees, “the yellow maize-stalk,” and
the newborn animal young—that ®ourish because this same earth has
accepted and transformed the deposits of “infused fetor.” In the highly
allusive line that gave the poem its original title and that underscores
Whitman’s faith in some form of resurrection, the poet celebrates “the
resurrection of the wheat [that] appears with pale visage out of its graves.”
The resurrected wheat imagery invites comparison with Paul’s sermon in
1 Corinthians 15, in which the wheat symbolizes the promise that the
dead shall be raised on the day of resurrection:
But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the ¤rstfruits
of them that slept.... But some man will say, How are the dead
raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that
which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And that which
thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare“The Progress of Souls” / 99