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I and This Mystery Here We Stand: Self and Nature in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Have you asked yourself, as the child does in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “What

is the grass?” and seen beyond the “romances” that conceal the “histories” of its existence

(Whitman p. 18)? Found in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” asks its readers to

examine the ideological truths (“the trivial unapproached”) which govern their lives to “see the

space and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums,” that is, to

abandon their pasts and delve deeply into the world before them (Whitman p. 5, p. 22). In lines

90-129 of “Song of Myself,” as Whitman peers into a leaf of grass, he sees the infinite, the unity

of life, the fusion of material and immaterial, the collapse of the physical into the spiritual, the

emergence of politics, and the manifestation of the poet; he sees the Whole. He coaxes the

unspeakable secret of existence out of the natural world surrounding him to reveal the constant

interplaying tension that defines the relation between the self and its position in nature.

Ultimately, Whitman urges his reader to accept his or her position as infinite by

reconceptualising nature itself.

In a spear of grass, Whitman sees a poem. The spear of grass can be read just as any

Bible or sacred text can be read to reveal the true nature of existence. It is a “uniform

hieroglyphic,” a divine text encoded in life and inscribed onto the material manifestation of

nature (97). It is uniformly present and uniformly descriptive, a totalizing narrative, a

microcosm. “And it means;” the spear is constantly informing the world and emanating purpose

(98). The grass speaks to Whitman both in the literal sense that it inspires the poem and the

physical sense of its movement; “so many uttering tongues” flick their “hints” into the air with

the passing breeze (110, 112). Nature is not a passive force in “Song of Myself”; rather, the texts
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of nature are incarnated with “full hands” (of grass) in the words of Whitman’s song (90). His

poems are the words of nature and his pages are the leaves of grass.

For Whitman, the self and the world are indistinguishable. When asked by a child in

“Song of Myself,” “What is the grass?,” Whitman sees not a spear of grass but the totality of

Being (90): he sees himself, the stalks thrusting upward declaring their presence as “a flag of

[his] disposition,” the symbol of his content with the world; (92) he sees the creator, his “scented

gift and rembrancer designedly dropped” in the form of “the handkerchief of the Lord,” a

reminder of the amalgam with God; (94, 93) he sees life, the smallest shoots “sprouting alike in

broad zones and narrow zones” with the fortitude of being, each sprout as “a child[, ...] the

produced babe of vegetation” (and to produce many babes more); (98, 96) and, he sees death, the

blades’ predestined return to the earth, standing now as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves”

(101). The grass comes to represent the totality of all things for Whitman (self, God, life, and

death), thus answering the riddle (Miller 640). He sees himself as implanted in a world

composed of the life force that composes him, seeing in the grass the ancestral line of “mothers’

laps” that makes constant creation out of the world as grass grows on the death beds of the If-I-

Had-Known-Them-I-Would-Have-Loved-Thems (105, 104). His grass springs forth

indiscriminately from the expired life of the “black folks as among white folks, / Kanuck,

Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, [giving] them the same [and receiving] them the same”

(Whitman 29). It is as Peter tells in his gospel “For all flesh is as grass [...] The grass withereth

[...] But the word [...] endureth forever” (Peter 1:24-25). What Whitman finds in his reading of

the grass complicates his ability to separate himself from the infinite world around him, thus

problematizing his conception of self and nature. He sees the grass beneath the grave stones

sprouting from the once-red, tongue-filled mouths of so many people he had never known, and
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the grass is a child—born. Unable to distinguish himself from the world or the other characters

that inhabit it, Whitman aims to uncover the “mystery” of the “procreant urge of the world”—

that is, to develop a new understanding of self, of life, and of nature (37, 43).

Forced into accepting an indivisible union of himself with the air that surrounds him,

with the mothers’ that supported him, and with the grass that reveals this sublime truth, Whitman

asks his readers to see themselves in all of nature. Whitman’s investigation into the microcosmic

world of life that is a spear of grass unfolds to him that he cannot be “contained between [his] hat

and boots,” that he is “immortal and fathomless” (124, 128). He sees his body in the world, in the

grass, in the dirt, in the city. This means an understanding that “there is really no death” (117).

Whitman sees the lives of the past and the lives of the future in his own life. As one life falls, it

inevitably “[leads] forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,” the death of one is the

life of another (118). And this pattern of reincarnation holds true for Whitman’s language as

well, the “Song of Myself” is sung in the words of grass that “come from the roofs of mouths[,

...] the faint red roofs of mouths” (108, 109, 111). “Song of Myself” speaks from the words of

the past that have been “translate[d]” from their present physical manifestations as grass to create

a revolutionary and evolutionary fervour towards life and creation in its reader (112).

Whitman’s discovery and acceptance of a fundamental unity in the forces of life and

death, of self and nature, redefines the poetic context for him. Connotation, metaphor, and

association thus become tools for the poet to demonstrate the connectedness of all things in the

universe and to complicate the subject’s place within the whole. The “lack of definiteness” that

characterizes Whitman’s writing in “Song of Myself” can be traced to a belief that an

obfuscation of the physical world through language could reveal that “[a]ll goes outward and

onward,” that everything is connected as if rooted in the grass in the necropolis (120). He asks
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for you to “perceive,” to “translate,” to “answer,” to sing his linguistic, poetically composed song

telling of a material, poetically composed universe (91, 110, 112). In this embrace, he tells us,

“your very flesh shall [become] a great poem” (Whitman p. 11). Whitman’s understanding of

poetic language dissolved the boundary between the physical world and the linguistically-

mediated world by utilizing poetry to complicate material boundaries between himself and the

grass. Thus the reader should recognize that he or she is “not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,”

but constantly dialectically composed within the whole—at once a force of life and a force of

death, “pass[ing] death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe” (124, 127). To

accept this dialectic is to accept the creative force of the universe, the “onward and outward,” the

“all good” (121, 126). This is the realization that all energy in the universe is connected and

creation and destruction are bound together, as William Blake says in his Marriage of Heaven

and Hell, “The cut worm forgives the plow” (Blake 71).

In addition to being read as an inquiry into the spiritual and material composition of the

world, Whitman’s question, “What is the grass?,” should be read as a politics of poetry, in which

he asks us to weave the flag of a new nation out of “hopeful green stuff” and write its

constitution in the poetry of nature (92). Whitman asks us to see “solid and beautiful forms of the

future where there are no solid forms” and reconceptualise the politics which governs a nation

growing out of the grass which feeds off of the decomposed bodies of its peoples and political

figures (the “Congressman”) (100; Whitman, p. 8). He asks us to fly this nation’s “flag” in the

name “of the Lord” and build a new American polis out of the poetic necropolis which hosts the

grass that grows on ancient bodies (92, 93). By spiritualizing the environment, Whitman’s

radical recognition of the subject’s dialectical position within the universe complicates the
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human relation with nature and exposes the “great fraud upon modern civilization and

forethought” which Whitman speaks of in his introduction to Leaves of Grass (Whitman p. 19).

Whitman’s song problematizes the fundamental frontier narrative that served as the

guiding ideology of “the greatest poem” (the United States)—that Americans were destined to

conquer vast amounts of Western North America and submit its natural capital to human rule and

extraction (Whitman p. 5). This idea, that gives so much movement and life to the America that

Whitman cherishes, that brings its vast people to its shores, the idea that creates the city, is in

truth an idea that Whitman equates to a denial of life. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman proposes a

“transcendent and new” interpretation of nature that accepts the oneness of existence. The

capitalist narrative that fed 19th century America’s advancement simultaneously gave the country

its “teeming” nature that Whitman found so desirable, while at the same, it drove its people

radically away from their environments and societies, culminating in widespread ecological

devastation and dehumanization (Whitman p. 5). This narrative denies the self in nature through

its “relentless objectification and quantification” and denies the fellow human being through a

“reduction of everything to relations of exchange” (Kovel 81). The poet, the poem, and the

poetic in nature are incompatible with the vision of Whitman’s America because capitalism, “as

a way of being,” denies the spiritual and the sacred, for “to be sacred means to be non-

exchangeable,” incommensurable (Kovel 81). Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in its embrace of

the immortality of the self in all things, that spiritualizes our environment, calls into question the

ornamented romance of capitalism that American people maintained with their nature in the

United States in the 19th century.

What is the grass? This is the mystery with which the poet stands (43). And this is where

I stop now, waiting for you (1336).

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Blake, William. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E Grant.

Blake's Poetry and Designs. NY: W.W. Norton and Company Inc, 2008. 68-82.

Kepner, Diane. "Walt Whitman's Theory of Nature in "Song of Myself"." American Literature

51.2 (1979): 179-204.

Kovel, Joel. "The Dialectic of Radical Ecologies." Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 14.1 (2003):

75-87.

Miller, James E. "'Song of Myself' as Inverted Mystical Experience." Modern Language

Association 70.4 (1955): 636-661.

Noble, Mark. "Whitman's Atom and the Crisis of Materiality in the Early Leaves of Grass."

American Literature 81.2 (2009): 253-279.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. New York: Viking Penguin Inc, 1959.