We find “Scented Herbage of My Breast” in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass where we once again come in contact with the momentary Whitman, who appears in each poem to take a seat in the middle of a nature walk and report his musings. I admittedly had never heard the word “Calamus,” so I was at first a bit disappointed to find out the word refers to sweet flags that grow on the end of tall grass blades. I guess I wanted something more reverential. However, after reading “Scented Herbage…” the section title comes to carry an ominous simplicity.
In this poem, Whitman ponders the floral blades which will one day alternate between life cycles above his grade, where he will remain constant in death. The poem shares many features with Whitman’s iconic eulogy to Abraham Lincoln, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” as he begins his intimate conversation with death, believing it essential to the “shifting forms of life.” Within this particular meditation, we see death as an omnipresent agent who hides behind the scenes waiting patiently for the right moment to take its course. Whitman pronounces his duty to sing the beauty of death’s presence, considering the blades which will one day spring from his grave are celebrated as a partner to love. This pairing is fleshed out by the floral blade image, as the leaves of death are granted an ascent “to the atmosphere of lovers.”
I struggle with my reading of Whitman’s “celebration” for death. On one hand, I want to trust our speaker and sincerely consider his consolation with the inevitable. However, the prospects don’t look so good when the poem is placed against its precedent “In Paths Untrodden” where Whitman muses the prospects of “athletic love.” With this in mind, it seems that lines in “Scented Herbage” like “O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death” indicates the poem’s message that love and death may not be as much partners as they are options, the leaves must spring for one or the other.
For “When Lilacs Last…” : http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174748
“Ominous simplicity” is a good way to put it. From the “uncut hair of graves” in Song of Myself, to the meditation on the recycling of humanity in “This Compost,” Whitman is rather obsessed with a literal and figurative incorporation of one’s body into the soil after one’s passing, and the way in which that kind of embodiment can still carry something of an erotic charge (again, read This Compost if you want to get a sense of what I mean). Whitman’s meditations on death can seem empty, so confident they are in this continuing presence. I think that’s one reason I so appreciate the tempered confidence of a poem like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” where absence seems more potent, even as the poet would seek to erase it. There, death is not folded back into the re-generating earth, but folded back into something much less certain: human memories, the continuity of human experience, etc.