Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may
see and remark, and say Whose?The above conceit pictures God playing a game of drop the handkerchief
with the favored persona in order to illustrate the principle that God’s
world is carpeted with decipherable emblems of universal benevolence.
To those who can read their meaning, the handkerchief, the letters, and
the grass are universal signi¤ers of the wonders of nature. Speculating in
a related metaphor that the grass may be “a uniform hieroglyphic,” the
persona foresees the time when nature’s emblems will be readable by all
human beings. In the art of ancient peoples, eighteenth-century scholar
Andrew Michael Ramsay declared, “the source of this primitive hiero-
glyphical language seems to have been the persuasion of the great truth
that the visible world is representative of the invisible, that the properties,
forms, and motions of the one were copies, images, and shadows of the
attributes, qualities, and laws of the other.”^12 Subsequently, the persona
seems to have gained a mastery of the ancient skill of “reading” the ob-
jective world, for in section 48 of “Song of Myself ” he appears con¤-
dent that he can interpret nature’s encoded messages. No longer feel-
ing obliged to say “I guess,” he declares boldly, “I ¤nd letters from God
dropped in the street, and every one signed by God’s name.”
But these hopeful images become darkened in the ¤nal twenty-one
lines of section 6. One becomes aware that the persona’s meditations may
be taking place in a graveyard, where it is only natural to associate the
grass with the thoughts about those who lie beneath it. He longs to trans-
late the arcane language of the grass that covers the graves of young
and old. He sees the grass as “the uncut hair of graves,” growing from
the breasts of young men whom he might have loved—tender mates,
perhaps, or mute inglorious Whitmans. (In “Scented Herbage of My
Breast,” 1860, the persona pictures himself as deceased, the grass sprout-
ing from his breast, and uttering emblematic “leaves” of poetry to readers
yet unborn.) In another emotional conceit he pictures the grass issuing
from the corpses of the elderly and from children “taken soon out of their
mothers’ laps, / And here you are the mothers’ laps,” he cries. Such sen-
timents were not unusual in an era marked by a high incidence of child-
38 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”