On Walt Whitman's "A child said, What is the grass?"

Growing up, I never loved Walt Whitman. Back then, I never loved Whitman, because I formed my perception of Whitman solely upon his oft-anthologized "O Captain, My Captain!" (a decent poem but really quite one-dimensional -- it's cool that the war was won, but it's sad that the captain died). I thus made the abysmal error of conflating a single poem with the poet's work as a whole. It ain't all broccoli, folks. Just because you don't like celery, doesn't mean you won't enjoy tomatoes.

Whitman's "A child said, What is the grass?" (http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15816) is a prized tomato in my book. I view it as one of the first American poems to successfully explore issues of race and multiculturalism in an emotionally compelling way.

I'd like to draw your attention to the stanza that proceeds, "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." Rather than bogging himself down in the sameness versus difference dichtomy that sometimes confounds multiculturalism and feminism, Whitman moves fluidly between sameness (sprouting alike), difference (in broad zones and narrow zones), sameness (growing among black homes as among white), difference (Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congresman, Cuff,), and sameness again (I give them the same, I receive them the same). This particular stanza explicitly focuses on race,

but then Whitman makes an abrupt transition to the next stanza, comprised solely of the elegant line, "And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves." It is a distinct quality of this poem that -- while it celebrates diversity in age, gender, and race -- it alternates this celebration with an honoring of what is universal about life at the same time. And this alternation is a vibrant one -- like bubbles blown in the air by children, not like a pendulum.

In "A child said, What is the grass?," Whitman also refuses to suppress or make stereotypical uses of color, which may stand for race. For example, in this stanza -- "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" -- darkness is not a representation of evil but merely exists as is, as a part of life. Sameness and difference both juxtapose and stack upon each other here with "The grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers" and "Darker than the color beards old men" taken as representations of sameness among each of the respective groups ("old mothers" and "old men") but representations of difference when read alongside each other.

In the following stanza, Whitman also proclaims, "O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!/ And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing," which one may interpret as a celebration for the fact that many dialects and languages are spoken in the United States of America.

The last couple stanzas move surprisingly from relatively more questioning and unsure stanzas (e.g., "What do you think has become of the young and old men?/ What do you think has become of the women and children?") to crescendo in a daringly self-assured proclamation of hope -- "They are alive and well somewhere;/ The smallest sprouts show 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."