![]() ![]() In a rousing scene of poetic expression, in Edson Oda’s Nine Days, Winston Duke launches into Whitman’s final canto: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” Duke unlocks the whole story of humanity and our borderless eternal connection, all with the ending of one poem. If we want to experience the world, we must first understand and embody it. We say what the grass is, hoping that it brings us back to this connection, unravelling endlessly in time and space. That we were born into it, same as the grass, and that every atom of our own being, and that of the grass, are produced from the same soil. “What is the grass?” How do you answer the child, who knows the metaphor and the meaning just as well as you? We cannot define the metaphor without understanding that the metaphor has always been our own mortal truth. The poem is the author himself, trying to explain the metaphor, but the metaphor is born the same as him and belongs to the Universe. ![]() In Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a poetic biography of the author and the American’s search for inner self, Whitman conveys that the American may search endlessly for their meaning and place in the Universe, but they ultimately can only resemble the Universe, as we always have (“for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”). Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |