hood mortality, when legions of minor poets and portrait painters memo-
rialized the deaths of children. And death is personi¤ed in Leaves of Grass
not only as a merciful mother who receives the dying and cradles them
in her soothing embrace but as a mother from whose womb offerings
emerge into a new, postmortem, life. In a related image, the persona be-
holds the grass as “so many uttering tongues” issuing from “under the
faint red roofs of mouths” of the interred, seemingly trying to reveal to
him what no mortal has yet understood—the secret of the grave. Yearn-
ing to read the emblems inherent in every aspect of existence, he hopes
to translate the still unintelligible secrets that the metonymic tongues of
graveyard grasses seem to be trying to tell him. Thwarted by his inability
to read their mystic language, he laments,
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.And as though he were soliciting the reader’s sympathy for his temporary
failure to explain death, he asks rather plaintively, “What do you think
has become of the young and old men? / And what do you think has
become of the women and children?” At midcentury, when millions of
Americans reportedly believed in spiritualism and other doctrines that
af¤rmed the possibility of life after death, he is safe in assuming that his
auditors will share his faith in an afterlife. Although most of section 6 is
notable for its gentle and understated tone, its concluding lines, which
proclaim the immortality of those who lie beneath the grass, are unusual
in their assertiveness:
They are all alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.All goes onward and outward.... and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 39