Stephen J. Tapscott explains that Whitman’s imagery of “spiritual and
vegetable generation” is particularly effective because “the Egyptian thana-
tology does ¤t, even closer than Christianity, the main tenets of death and
immortality. For the Egyptians, all the dead become Osiris, participating
in his essence in a future of perfect democracy.”^45 The persona con®ates
times and eras, simultaneously assuming the roles of the dead god and of
the mortal poet who looks into the future and beholds the countless gen-
erations who will savor his perpetually fresh tomb-leaves—Leaves of
Grass, the product of his breast—and be enchanted and invigorated by
them. And he expresses the hope that these leaves will in time reveal the
secret of death.
Among the imagined comrades who may, in this life or the next, be-
come the persona’s lovers is Death itself. Just as the persona had implored
a “word” from the sea to explain the cosmic order in “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking” and begged the elements for encouraging signs in “As
I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” so in “Scented Herbage of My Breast”
he coaxes his lover Death to con¤de its ultimate secret, which he aspires
to translate for humanity:
Through me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating,
Give me your tone, therefore, O Death, that I may accord with it,
Give me yourself—for I see that you belong to me now above all,
and are folded together above all—you, Love, and Death are,
Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was
calling life,
For now it is conveyed to me that you are the purports essential.By “according” with Death the poet-persona would create the music of
death. “According,” in this context, implies striking a harmonious chord
from the heart—the cor—of the persona and the heart of Death. In plead-
ing with Death to “give me yourself,” he expresses a wish that thrums like
a tragic ostinato throughout the “Calamus” poems and through much of
Leaves of Grass. Whitman, who had earlier declared himself to be “the
poet of materials” no less than “the poet of the soul,” here identi¤es death
as “the real reality” that waits “behind the mask of materials” and “will
one day, perhaps, take control of all” and “will perhaps dissipate the entire
show of appearances.” Although these words may disguise the fear that
death will obliterate the individual life and all sensation, they seem in-
tended to convey the idealist concept that mortals do not yet inhabit the
“So Long!” / 151