Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
Poems of Sentiment: I. TimeWhat is the Grass?
Walt Whitman (18191892)A
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
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?
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.
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.
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
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.
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.