FIVE

LUCKIER

Years ago, in Lincoln, Nebraska—far from home in more ways than one—I realized I’d forgotten my copy of Leaves of Grass. I was teaching a poetry workshop in fifteen minutes. I walked into the nearest used bookstore, pulled a copy off the shelf (there is a copy of the Leaves in every used bookstore, everywhere in the nation, count on it), and bought the book without opening it. The passage I wanted was the sixth section of “Song of Myself,” which begins with these famous lines:

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.

Ten minutes later, standing over a whirring little copy machine, I turned to the page I’d sought. It was inked in the margins with notes, inscribed in the looping, markedly undergraduate hand of a student, a young woman, I assumed, the dots on her i’s surrounded with little rings of flower petals. She had written, beside the poet’s initial question, “Isn’t it grass?”

I was exasperated, then amused, and later my class laughed about it when I told the story. But as we talked, I was surprised to discover I felt grateful to the young note-taker for providing a clear illustration of a mindset I recognize. She seems content with the knowledge she already has. Once the grass has been identified, a defining label conferred, she won’t need to consider it again.

But the child has not asked, after all, “What is this green stuff?” and is not in search of a word; she or he wants something else. What, exactly? The question is deeper and stranger than it first seems, on the order of Marianne Moore’s question, “What are years?” or the query of King David in the Psalms: “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” These questions don’t seek labels, classifications, or technical answers; they are after something more essential, and in that quest the question of what being is inevitably resides. To be in any form, what is that?

Those questions seem unlikely to trouble the student decorating her letters in the poem’s margin. I’m making an example of her, I know, based on a single comment; in all likelihood she’s a far more complex person than her marginal note would suggest. But here she expresses—or perhaps records the way her literature teacher expressed—the opposite of the artistic temperament, answering the poet’s question with a pragmatic one.

This presents a sweet, provocative paradox. The poet, the one you’d expect to have faith in language, knows that naming alone does nothing to dispel mystery. For him a word is a gesture in the direction of reality, and does not limit or circumscribe; the poet knows that nothing at all is settled by the word. On the contrary, perhaps what words do is propel us further into the uncertain nature of the real. They pry open possibilities, and suddenly the plain grass seems to be rustling with meanings.

MY EAST TENNESSEE GRANDMOTHER, who was born around twenty years after Whitman published his first edition, believed this world to be in its final days. The songs she sang and verses she read aloud pictured what surrounds us as a veil to be seen through, a text of instruction. Like Emerson—whose riveting lecture in New York in the 1840s on the need for a truly American poet set one member of his audience, Walt Whitman, ablaze before nearly a word of Leaves of Grass had been written—she thought the world a scrutable book of signs.

She liked to read aloud to me from Revelations. Biblical authorities had thoroughly explicated the New Testament, making its meanings fixed and clear, but this book remained rewardingly mysterious. I was four, and I enjoyed her readings thoroughly: here were winged horsemen, and the earth cracking open, and dripping beasts rising from the sea.

Whitman insisted that one needed no spiritual teacher, no intermediaries between oneself and the divine, and no holy scriptures—except, perhaps, his own! This probably makes him more of a Protestant than my Presbyterian grandmother, who loved the radio preacher Oral Roberts and relied on his voice for strength and guidance. The poet’s allegiance was to the pleasure and instruction to be gained in reading the signs for oneself.

Thus Section 6 begins with an engaging series of metaphors, offered in an attempt to say what the grass is. They are presented as speculations, or hunches, and most begin with some variation of the phrase “I guess.” No “I guess” is to be found in the Bible; no prophet proposes varying ways to read the same emblem, and no knowledge seems tentative, or under construction. The poet’s answers are exploratory, and the multiplicity of them suggests no single answer will suffice. One figure does not cancel out the others; the grass is a flag, a handkerchief, a hieroglyphic text, a host of living tongues. These images comprise a thought experiment, an inquiry into the nature of grass, into the nature of nature—even, really, into thinking itself, how the words and images we use to frame the world themselves define what we’re able to see.

I loved to sit on my grandmother’s lap while she read me those apocalyptic verses, in the green rocking chair I’d known forever as hers. I felt enthroned, in a wonderful way, and my realm consisted of her lap and the book. She’d hold the black leatherette cover between her two intricately aged hands, spotted and veined, so that both of us could see it. Each page was printed in two columns, with numbers beside each verse, and I liked how the words of Jesus appeared in red ink the color of licorice or cherries. I’d ridden on my uncle’s lap, on his roan mare, and he’d lifted me up to touch cherries on a tree in his orchard, still green, though reddened on one side, sweetness on the way.

This was reading: in the warm space where you are held, you listen to the words and let yourself go wherever they want to take you. You can follow the movement of her finger along the line of print and learn to tell where words start and stop. The spaces that open between sentences, those you fill up yourself, with the images that rise up in you as you listen: cherries, sweet chariot, red ink.

“HAVING BEEN A PRINTER MYSELF,” Whitman told Horace Traubel, “I have what may be called an anticipatory eye—know pretty well as I write how a thing will turn up in the type—appear—take form.” Whitman set the first dozen pages or so of his first edition in type himself, and this section was among those pages. You can feel the hand of the printer in them: the physical arrangement of the words on the page mirrors the movement of thought. Each proffered possibility gets its own stanza: a single image is presented, considered, set down. In the white space of silence between stanzas the poet seems to be gathering himself, feeling his way toward his next assertion. The mind pauses, dwells, prepares to speak.

It’s a little hard to imagine, from the vantage of our time, just how radical an innovation this was. How odd it seemed to Whitman’s early readers, who were accustomed to those evenly patterned stanzas—lines in groups of two or three or four, most often, but then in longer clusters too—that would remain standard poetic custom for another fifty years. Stanza breaks like these mostly serve to create a pattern. They are intervals of measurement, not a space for making meaning.

But every time Whitman ends a stanza in “Song of Myself,” a thought or line of thinking comes to rest, and it seems as if the speaker waits, as we do, for the next idea, the poem’s next gesture, to well up and then spill onto the page. The poem breaks into a new modernity by turning silence into an active force, charging absence with an alert, considering presence. In Whitman’s hands—literally so, in these pages where he’s set the type himself—the blank space between stanzas seems athrum with possibility; we pause and watch thought loom up out of silence.

These stanzas suggest that the poet is coming to knowledge as the poem is being spoken, not simply offering an orderly recitation of an insight already attained. Thus we’re allowed a remarkably intimate relation with the interiority of another—or at least with an active, dynamic representation of a mind at work. The poem intends, in its very structure, its stops and starts, guesses and hesitations, to build a model of consciousness, a dramatic presentation of the self engaged in experience. These poems seem to come into being before our eyes. This is why Whitman so often writes in the present tense, why he turns to us with his questions and invitations; he understands that his voice exists in a continuously occurring moment, speaking directly to men and women of a generation and many generations hence.

“I GUESS,” THE PHRASE THAT LAUNCHES many of these stanzas, is the language of the fellow depicted on the frontispiece of the book, slouch hat and hand on hip, open shirt and open stance. His casually spoken surmises allow us to relax into each stanza’s premise and entertain the ones to come. These aren’t firm assertions, but something more like possibilities for contemplation.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

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?

It’s a good thing this friendly, offhand voice disarms us, since the poem moves swiftly into peculiar territory. A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped has a playful rhythmic flourish to it, and sounds innocently Victorian. Until, that is, one pictures Jehovah daintily letting drop a perfumed, monogramed token in order to catch our attention. Such seductive behavior is at odds, to put it mildly, with traditionally masculine images of the Almighty. Could the Voice that spoke from the burning bush be a feminine flirt?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . . the produced babe

of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

The grass is mirror of the child who asked the question, and perhaps by extension a double of the poet, who relinquishes adult knowledge and practical certainty for a childlike, questioning openness that restores to things their original strangeness. After the beat of a stanza break comes a new proposition: the grass itself is writing, like the poem spread before us, and its intent is to signify the vegetative world’s perfect democracy, the equality of all in the eyes of nature.

Whitman knew hieroglyphics from a private Egyptological museum upstairs at 659 Broadway, in the neighborhood now known as SoHo. The museum housed the collection of Dr. Henry Abbott, a British physician who’d lived for decades in Cairo. The poet wrote in the museum’s guest book that he had visited twenty times—drawn by splendid sculptures, or the mummified bull and cats on display, or the complex and elusive script on long strips of papyrus? He was often the sole visitor; Abbott’s museum closed in just seven years, never having achieved popular success.

The collection would later find its way into the Brooklyn Museum, where it continues to grant viewers something it must also have evoked for Whitman: a sense of the immensity of time, the vastness that lies beneath or behind the present moment. He must have been struck by the poignance of something as fragile as writing reaching across the space of five thousand years; perhaps witnessing such persistence makes the work of a poet seem less embattled, less private or futile. If, five thousand years after you struggle to capture on the page the character of some passing moment, an instance of grief or delight, someone in a city that did not exist in your lifetime translated your words . . . The life of the poem might be extended in ways you cannot know, and continue in a world so far from yours as to be nearly unimaginable. The circle that is the outer edge of your life extends, and goes on extending.

The words the grass spells out are written in an ancient language, but they are clearly legible. It sprouts alike in expansive countryside and urban plots, and is indifferent to political or cultural forces, be they liberal or restrictive. Growing among black folks as among white is a clear and direct refutation of white supremacy, an assertion of equality framed by using the testimony of earth. Nature does not care about race, the poet asserts, writing at a time when ideas of what is “natural” were often used to justify slavery, the elimination of native peoples, and the subjugation of women. This is the first venture into overtly political territory in a poem we might view, up to this point, as a spiritual text. Whitman was not a poet who could hold the spiritual and the social apart, and his poem becomes larger and more distinctly American by acknowledging here what Wallace Stevens would later call “the pressure of reality.” Democracy, ethics, how we are to form a social compact that honors and allows the dignity and beauty of all our bodies—these elements are now on stage in “Song of Myself.”

Spoken aloud, the short list of persons the grass treats equally is a lively example of Whitman’s often acute ear. Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff: the sequence of k’s and hard c’s puts the lips, jaws, and tongue through a quick workout. The political wind that’s just blown into the poem leads Whitman to make a very American list. Kanuck is slang for Canadian, Tuckahoe a tribe from the Northeast. Congressman needs no gloss, though it’s worth noting that Whitman didn’t hold much respect for them. Cuff is a now-archaic slang term for African American. It’s startling, halfway through this line, to discover that now the grass is speaking, ventriloquized by the poet: I give them the same, I receive them the same.

Because the written word is silent, it seems natural to imagine the grass as quietly covering the earth with its alphabet. But now the speaker not only hears the grass, he slips into its voice. What the grass says here is equally true of Whitman: His poem is uttered to the world, freely available, offered: I give them the same, I receive them the same.

Receive is the pivotal word here. It’s easy to see how the poem receives us, its doors equally open to all. In what way does the grass receive us? Now the trapdoor in Whitman’s meditation opens and sends him tumbling down beneath the soil, into the earth itself, the underworld the poem’s been feeling its way toward.

The next line is an anarchist’s bomb tossed into the house of nineteenth-century verse. I suspect it’s the first one-line stanza in American poetry. Isolated as it is by white space above and below, it seems to stop us in our tracks, as what’s been an associative, unhurried meditation suddenly accumulates solidity and urgency, its weight made apparent in these twelve words, with their calm, reverent ferocity:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I have read that line hundreds of times, in many contexts, and inevitably I still respond with a quick, internal gasp. It comes winging into the poem as if from nowhere—yet absolutely, inevitably belongs here as well, the poem’s center of gravity, its linchpin.

With an unshakeable confidence conveyed by directness and brevity, Whitman asserts that something we’re not accustomed to considering beautiful is so. Take away that one adjective of praise and the line loses much of its power, partly because the uncut hair of graves carries some of the creepy commonplace that the hair of the dead goes on growing in the grave. But put beautiful—usually a rather flat, unenlightening adjective—back in place, and the line feels electric. This isn’t the mown and tended grass of the cemeteries of thriving churches, or of the well-to-do. The poet prefers the unkempt graves, the wild ones, the unmarked ones, and how would we know where they are? The answer is simple: everywhere.

Larry Levis, an American poet of the later twentieth century and a far sadder, shattered heir of Whitman, described the earth as “a limitless ossuary of horses.” Given all the horses who’ve ever lived on earth, isn’t the soil a great repository of their remains? Just as it is the ossuary of us, from the beginning of human time; those who drew wry, elegant forms on the walls of caves, who invented syntax, who dragged the first city’s stones into place, those who baked the kings’ cakes and those who dragged the aristocrats to their deaths, the slave traders and the unthinkably miserable packed into their holds, farmers and readers and those who made hats: all held in the vast treasury of flecks of what once were and sometimes still are bones. A sad chain of Soviet dogs, as far as I know, are the only creatures born on earth whose remains did not return to it.

Did you doubt, a sly Whitman seems to ask in the background, that this was leading somewhere? Trust me. In this line the locked doors of matter have swung open, and reality has revealed itself to the poet’s gaze. Until this process of questioning had been undertaken, bringing the speaker to this moment, it was not possible for him to see the true nature of the grass: That it is a visible, reanimated, breathing form of the dead.

I WAS FIVE, the night my grandmother died. That year we lived on the edge of Nashville, in a large rented farmhouse. The horses that roamed in the pastures around the house and the ramshackle outbuildings behind it weren’t ours. In the largest of the pastures they looked tiny, when they were farthest away.

A commotion wakes me in the night, red light turning in a circle in the driveway—are the horses scared? I’m on the couch, wrapped in a quilt, maybe one she made. Everyone’s too busy to attend to me. I think it’s my mother who tells me what’s happened, how my grandmother woke in the night gasping for air, and threw the window in her room open wide, and still couldn’t breathe. I understand that a minister is coming, a fact that seems odd and important, and that I should stay here, out of the way, and let my parents tend to whatever it is they need to do.

This story now moves out of time, into dream time, so I don’t know if my dream came then and there, on the couch, where I’d been placed in an out-of-the-way spot, to spare me something, or because they needed my room, my bed. Logic would say the dream came then, but it seems sure to me that in fact it came sooner, and this is why I wasn’t crying or afraid. This was what the boy I was saw: my room was entirely dark, except at the foot of my bed there was a circle of light, the way a lamp will sometimes cast a perfect circle on the floor. In the circle was an old cane chair, with a round seat and curved back, and my grandmother stood behind it. She’d come to see me, and to tell me things she wanted me to hear. Of what she said I remember nothing at all, and I doubt that I remembered any word of hers a day later, or even an hour. What I recall is a sense of absolute and unconditional love, of protection and warmth; whatever awaited me in this life, she was a guardian, a steady presence, and not gone.

TENDERLY WILL I USE YOU, the poet says to the curling grass, because his insight into the nature of matter brings him into a new kinship to things. If everything we see is composed of reconstituted, returning bodies, then aren’t we called to regard the least thing in the world carefully?

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,

And here you are the mothers’ laps.

As the grass formed a flag, a handkerchief, a child and a hieroglyphic, the poem concerned itself with composition. Now it must attend to decomposition, how the elements of the world break apart and come together again in new forms. The grass has sprouted from these various bodies, and though the separation of a child taken young from the mother is an occasion of grief, look—suddenly you are the thing you’ve lost! What sort of strange gift and continuance is that?

This is as good a place as any to talk about another meaning flickering through these stanzas. Printers like Whitman set wooden type into frames, using blanks between words, and spacer bars and screw-in bolts to hold the text in place from either side, above and below. Such work made for a complex craft, requiring practice to create printed pages that were centered, orderly, and well designed. It was common for printers to make up dummy pages, setting any text of their own devising, then ink the type to check the results. Such pages—bits of nonsense, trial runs, nothing to be taken too seriously—were, in printers’ slang, called “grass.”

The suggestion then—already nascent in the stanza about grass as hieroglyphic—is that, like flesh itself, words are in circulation, springing into being everywhere, falling away. Just as our bodies cycle through the world of materiality, so the poem of the world inscribes and speaks itself.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

Whitman’s associative movement in this passage is marvelously available, from beards to mouths, from mouths to tongues, from tongues to utterance. Now that hieroglyphic is not merely a field of letters waiting to be read, but an active congress of tongues. The title of Whitman’s endlessly evolving book doesn’t point to the usual “blades” or “spears” of grass, but leaves, pages in one book, not separate beings but part of one organism, one tree. The poem itself is made of grass. The poem composes itself out of what decomposes. The words of the dead, the words of the old books, emerge here into new pattern and new life.

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.

The poet longs for the power to translate the speech of things, the language of all those uttering tongues. It’s as if he is somehow invoking this power, calling upon whatever reserves of interiority, whatever energies residing in language and in the grass itself that might allow such a radical transmission. He turns to a question as if drawing in his breath. It’s a gesture of humility. Just as he said “I do not know what it is” when the child posed the question that launched the poem, he asks twice now “What do you think . . .” as if he wants understanding to be held communally, to be constructed together.

But this rhetorical maneuver—a device he might have gleaned from orators he admired—also prepares us to accept the sweeping statements of the final stanza in their blazing certainty. By making the question ours as well as his, he gains authority to assert the poem’s ultimate, daring claim.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are 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.

Imagine that last stanza ending after the second line, and you can see what a careful work of persuasive rhetoric this passage performs. It is difficult to say “there really is no death.” We counter that claim instinctively; of course we die. But Whitman goes on, and that little “if” allows the initial negation of death to be less baldly declarative, made more complex by its surroundings. Looking back from this vantage point, it suddenly becomes clear that the poem could have ended at many points along the way; many of these stanza-ends have the feel of some kind of psychic arrival, a claim placed upon meaning. Had the poet’s energies faltered sooner, we’d be reading the poem still, but it’s the astonishing extension of its reach that makes it the towering thing it is, with an ending that nothing could have entirely prepared us for. After his gesture of qualification, Whitman seems again to draw energy, to summon whatever powers will move him forward, and leaps to his final stanza.

All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

As Whitman wrestled with this unruly scrawl of a poem over time, one of the nods he made toward convention was to make all his ellipses consistent, using the standard three dots. But in his first edition, he uses these dots in a more expressive way, ranging between three and eight dots in a row as if to indicate either how much has been left out or how long he might like us to pause. Here the four dots create a silence contained inside the penultimate line that seems to make it vibrate with contained energy, an expanding space held in place by the opposition of the two phrases on either side of it, as if it were indeed a bit of that “onward and outward.” Just as the grass cannot be contained within any single metaphor, its meanings inexhaustible, so death likewise cannot be adequately named. It is, permanently, “different.” That is a nearly hollow word, almost an empty signifier, like “beautiful” above, but Whitman again charges an essentially null term with unaccountable life.

The poem could stop, after “what any one supposed,” and we’d be left with a completed arc, a fulfilled text. But he has one more gesture to make, in the breathtaking addition of his final two words. Luckier is a slangy, streetwise term, decidedly American, one that would no-wise appear in, say, Wordsworth. It has a conversational immediacy, and it asks us, in a single word, to reconsider all we’ve just read, to revisit these images of grass leaping from the mouths of the dead, from the dead mothers’ laps, curling from the chests of young men like dark green hair, and to understand that those are images of good fortune, and of joy.

The dead are not lost, but in circulation; they are involved in the present, in active participation. Bits of them are streaming through your hand and mine, just as language is circulating through us. Lexicon and materiality forever move onward and outward in the continuous wheeling expansion this world is. This is no mere philosophical proposition on Whitman’s part, not an intellectual understanding but a felt actuality. We are alive forever in the endless circulation of matter. Nothing luckier, stranger, or more beautiful could ever happen. There is no better place.