...recalls section 6 of "Song of Myself," where the child's question, "What is the grass?" is answered: "I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven." The flags in "Song of the Banner at Daybreak" are woven of different stuff, threatening to woo the...

...mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed. A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?....! do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful...

...gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. King David, Psalms 103: 15-16 A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands: How...could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it is more than he. Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass," 1855 before I was able to walk I have roamed grassy...

...Here, question and answer create a rising and falling effect, ending in a stop. Whitman continues; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. The same question-and-answer pattern is repeated, with the same rising and falling effect. This is...

...the 129 "witness" by some mystics), he finds that the self-evident is unnamable: A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?....! do not know what it is any more than he.86 Whitman's best guesses as to the nature of the grass include...

...asked by a child.) In section 6 of this poem, he offers several definitions: First, he says of grass: "I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven." Other references to "stuff" in this poem are: voices [. . .] of wombs and of the father-stuff This...

...Myself" (1855-81), when a child asks, "What is the grass?" the poet defines the grass as part of himself: "I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven" (pt. 6, 192-93). He further suggests (in pt. 24) that his own voice contains other voices, thus claiming...

...the child's hand and underneath wrote these lines from "Song of Myself": "A child said to me, ' What is the grass?' fetching it to me with full hands.— How could I answer the child?"16 The experiment produced rather comic results, and Whitman did not duplicate the image in...

...mouthpiece and to respect nature's opacity; they suggest, in other words, a New World poetics of oblivion: I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or 1 guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, Or I guess the grass is itself a child ... the produced...

...For Whitman, the grass is alternately "the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven"; "the handkerchief of the Lord, / A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt" (to catch the attention of human lovers, "that we may see and remark, and say Whose7."); a child itself,...