From "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman

         6

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.

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 dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may 

          see and remark, and say Whose?

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.

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

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
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, or from offspring taken soon 

          out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

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.

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.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And 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 ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Source of the text - Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, pages 33-35.

TJB: Lawnsong; grass-apotheosis. The poet’s tone—Taoist, Wordsworthian, sublime, intimate, inclusive—is unforgettable, as is the extended grass-metaphor.