trines that ®ourished at midcentury. Like the blind John Milton who
was willing to “stand and wait” for divine guidance, the persona declares:
“I have no mockings and arguments... I witness and wait.” The true
poet’s access to uncorrupted speech comes only with the in®ux of inspi-
ration.
The persona ¤rst attempts to explain the meaning of death in the cele-
brated sixth section of Leaves of Grass, whose distinctively naive and wist-
ful tone may indicate that it was written as an independent piece and
then ¤tted into the poem’s larger structure. Section 6 begins with the
persona’s somber-playful response to a child’s simple question, “What is
the grass?” The grass, of course, is the poem’s (and the volume’s) core
symbol, its leitmotif, seemingly inexhaustible in its rami¤cations and em-
bodying the mysteries of nurture, decay, death, and renewal. The grass
that grows by absorbing the life-giving energy of the sun becomes a
metaphor of “the ceaseless springing forth of life from death.”^10 Like Ten-
nyson’s “®ower in the crannied wall,” it is a microcosm that embodies and
encodes the entire mystery of existence. The awesome challenge to ex-
plain the mystery of life and death is expressed in words of startling in-
genuousness:
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.However, the persona’s disarming admission that he cannot translate this
master symbol into words that will satisfy the child—or satisfy himself—
is a rhetorical device that serves to introduce a series of tentative answers
meant to show how deeply Whitman has probed into this mystery.
In response to the child’s challenge to explain the meaning of the grass,
the poet resorts to analogy and metaphor—a rhetorical strategy that he
follows throughout the poems in attempting to interpret the meaning of
death. The grass is itself a master metaphor, of course, and as is the case
with metaphors, it is de¤ned by employing other metaphors. Although
the grass appears in the Psalms as a symbol of mankind’s helpless suscep-
tibility to mortality and dissolution,^11 the persona, employing a pathetic
fallacy, offers the playful (and subjective) conjecture that the grass that
blankets the earth may be the objecti¤cation of his own self—“the ®ag of
my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven,”
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 37