Scented Herbage of My Breast (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walt Whitman
- First Published: 1860
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Nature, Spiritual life or spirituality, Beauty, Death or dying, Afterlife, Life and death, Mortality, Seasons, Grasses
The Poem
In “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” as in the other poems in the collection entitled Leaves of Grass, the poet Walt Whitman adopts a mask or persona through whom he speaks. The voice of this persona assumes various tones, usually ones that suggest a robust, celebratory, all-embracing stance toward life. In this particular lyric poem, the persona addresses himself to herbage, or grass, a symbol that is at the heart of the volume of poetry in which this poem appears.
The speaker begins by noting the timelessness of the grass, whose perennial roots are...
[The entire page is 1139 words long]
