Introduction Main body

Scented herbage of my breast,
Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards,
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death.
The leaves will grow above death, will survive the winter and bloom again, because although the speaker does not know how many "passing by will discover you or inhale your faint odor, . . . a few will." That is, of course, the poems will be read and understood on their own terms by a few, and this correct reading will be the blooming of the poems. The leaves are more than a monument, however; they are also in a peculiarly Whitmanesque way fed by the poet's own death. They are not only "tomb-leaves" but also "body-leaves." The poet asserts that he has little control over them or their significance:
I permit you to tell in your own way of the heart that is under you,
I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves, you are not happiness,
You are often more bitter than I can bear.
They are, then, "body-leaves," springing from the breast rather than the brain -- not, in other words, intellectually worked out, but direct manifestations of the heart. Their associations with death are also complex. "You are beautiful to me, you faint tinged roots," he says, "you make me think of death." They make him think of death not only because they are associated with his own death but because nothing is "finally beautiful" except love and death. In this way he brings together the three principal motifs of the poem and of the section -- death, love, and his poems. But suddenly the poet is impatient with the inscrutability of the "emblematic and capricious" leaves, both the leaves growing from his breast and the leaves of the book which are his poems; he commands them to "grow up taller," to become more lucid and direct, to "spring away from the concealed heart there!" They are folded into their roots, they stifle and choke him: if he is to speak of their nature he cannot do it through them. He says, "I will say what I have to say by itself," that is, without the characteristic complexity of his other poems; he will raise the song of lovers and comrades, and through him "shall the words be said to make death exhilarating." The poet identifies love with death and with the relationship between the poet and his reader. Death and love are "folded inseparably together" just like the poem-leaves of his book; in death, in love, and in the relationship with the poet the soul merges with something else. These poems, growing out of the poet's death like the grass on a grave, feeding on his body, rising out of his breast, embody the exhilaration which accompanies that merging. It is this which lies behind "the shifting forms of life," the poet says, it is this which is "the real reality" behind the "mask of materials" just as the "purports essential" lie behind the mask of the material from which the poems are made. It is through this merging with something else, through death and love and these poems, that we pierce "the mask," that we "dissipate this entire show of appearance." It is this that "it is all for" and when material things pass away, it is this that is left; the show "does not last so very long, but you will last very long."
Whitman's chant of lovers and comrades has become a chant of all the methods of attaining a mystical merging with something else; and it is a song of his own poetry because his own poetry represents and causes such a merging. "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," the next poem in the section, first makes this clear. In this poem Whitman says most directly -- saying what he has to say by itself -- that the reader-poet relationship must be the relationship of lovers.10 In this poem the poet becomes the book and speaks to the reader. "I am not what you supposed, but far different," he says. This is not merely another book of poetry but something far more "emblematic and capricious" and something far more dangerous. He warns the reader not to attempt to become "a candidate for my affections" (that is, to enter into that relationship with the poet which is necessary in order to comprehend the poems fully) unless he is willing to accept all the consequences, to "give up all else," to go the uncertain way to a perhaps destructive result, perhaps to something very like death: certainly to a merging with something else. But, he says, if you choose not to "put me down and depart on your way," then take me, the book, to "paths untrodden," "by stealth in some wood" or "back of a rock in the open air." For when you attempt to read this book in the normal way, equipped with the usual preconceptions about literature and about the proper relationship between reader and poet, "I emerge not." In houses, in company, in libraries -- "I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead." Whitman asserts, in other words, that his barbaric yawp cannot be read as poetry was normally read by his contemporaries but requires a whole new set of attitudes and expectations. If, then, the reader makes himself entirely alone, separates himself from those attitudes and expectations, he can enter into the necessary relation with the poet and the book, the relation symbolized by "the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss, / For I am the new husband and I am the comrade." The reading, the relationship, must be analogous to a physical and emotional rather than an intellectual relationship: