like some of his utopian contemporaries—projected the resolution of his
troubles and the problems facing civil society into an idealized world
situated in some possible future.
The most striking poem of love and death in the “Calamus” sequence,
“Calamus 2” (“Scented Herbage of My Breast”), has been called “a con-
densed nocturne, a symbolic descent into the realms of death and the
unconscious.”^43 It is Whitman’s variation of the Osiris myth, which, in
some of its versions, tells of grass growing from the breast of the dead
Egyptian god whose name was synonymous with the forces of good-
ness and vegetation. After Osiris is slain by his evil brother, according
to the myth, and segments of his dismembered body are buried in differ-
ent places, each burial site becomes a place of worship. When his sis-
ter Isis has gathered his bodily parts he is resurrected as a god and copu-
lates with her in order to perpetuate their divine dynasty. In “Scented
Herbage of My Breast” the Osirislike Whitman persona celebrates “the
scented herbage”—the “tomb-leaves, body leaves, growing above me,
above death”—issuing not only from Osiris, but those that will issue from
the breast of his buried self. The sweet perfume exuded by the “herbage”
sprouting from the lifeless body is (consistent with Egyptian mythology)
a token of divinity. The grave-herbage imagery also serves as an effective
metaphor for all of Whitman’s death-saturated poetry or as D. H. Law-
rence remarked hyperbolically, “Walt’s great poems are really huge fat
tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.”^44 In a Chinese box of meta-
phors, the poem’s herbage “becomes” the fragrant leaves of grass, the
pages of the poet’s book, the token of universal adhesive love issuing from
the persona’s heart, and a joyous symbol of his immortality:
Yet you are very beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots—you
make me think of Death,
Death is beautiful from you—(what indeed is beautiful, except
Death and Love?)
O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of
lovers—I think it must be for Death,
For how calm, how solemn it grows, to ascend to the atmosphere
of lovers,
Death or life I am then indifferent—my Soul declines to prefer,
I am not sure but the high Soul of lovers welcomes death most,
Indeed, O Death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the
same as you mean.150 / “So Long!”