Scented herbage of my breast
The Whitman of Calamus is more passive and receptive than the poet of “Song of Myself.” In “In paths untrodden,” he describes himself as “responding” and “talked to” by tongues aromatic, answering a life that is “strong upon him.” Now he is “yielding” leaves from his corpse and permitting them to tell, in their own way, about his heart, burned and stung by the poetry-plants. He claims that he will unbare his broad breast from its stiflement, but in the paean to death that follows it seems that – paradoxically – he is not freeing but immolating himself – probably because homoerotic love is still something that cannot be shown freely in his lifetime.
In “In paths untrodden,” the word “sham” indicates conventional life and conventional poetry. In “Scented herbage,” “sham” broadens out to include “this entire show of appearance,” the “mask of materials,” these “shifting forms of life.” The poet questions all our perceptions of life – perhaps life itself – and suggests that only death can unmask them.
Death exhilarates because it offers the gateway to immortal life and ultimate truth, but also because it carries an erotic charge: it is “folded together above all” with love. One reason for the fusion of death and love may be that Whitman, believing in the immortality of the soul and frustrated by his inability to find true, enduring love on earth, anticipates a full communion of souls after he dies. Another, quite different reason may be that in the ecstasy of erotic love he has experienced something like death – a little death, a forgetting of life, a blotting out, a standing outside one’s self, or a joy so strong that it renders him indifferent to life. He may identify homoerotic love with death in part because he associates heterosexual love with procreation, fertility, and life. Finally, it may be that love is like death because when he loves unrequitedly, it feels like dying.
Whitman sometimes fears (or longs for) death as extinguishment, but more often he thinks of it as inextricable with life. The body dies, but its atoms return to the soil, water, and air, furnishing compost for the grass, flowers, and trees. In lines like “O the winter shall not freeze you, delicate leaves,” he expresses a spiritual hope in the immortality of his songs and, more broadly, in the continuance of life in the face of death.
If Whitman is to make death exhilarating, it may seem odd that he also makes it so grotesque, with the image of herbage growing out of his breast. But his grossness is much like Shakespeare’s; it stems from his cosmic inclusivity, his desire to make every material reality, no matter how ugly and terrifying, part of his beautiful whole. He wants us to find death exhilarating without glossing over its earthiness and its weird interpenetration with life.