“Autumn Rivulets” contains forty-four poems and is one of the longest sections of the book, as well as one of the last to be compiled. It first appeared in the 1881 edition and has no clear unifying theme, though it does shift the focus of the collection from the body to the spirit. It contains one of Whitman’s most controversial poems, “To a Common Prostitute,” which led to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass being condemned as obscene by the Boston district attorney. 

The Return of the Heroes

Whitman begins by writing about the land—the “soil of autumn fields” —to which he has recently retired. America is rich, fecund, and “swimming in plenty.” All too recently, he sang songs of war, first elated and then full of pity for the sickness, maiming, and death he witnessed on the battlefield. He then asks whether the dead should intrude “on these days of brightness” that follow the war and replies that he does not forget the dead, whose phantoms glide by him in silence.

The poet saw many heroes return, though the greatest of all will never return. The soldiers who came back from the war were young, but they returned home different, having become hardened veterans. Now, they will fight saner, life-giving wars as they work the land, wielding better weapons and watched by “the Mother of All.” Across the new land of the United States, the former soldiers gather a rich harvest: wheat in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin, maize in Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, cotton in Mississippi or Alabama, and wool in California or Pennsylvania. “Under the beaming sun,” they pull apples from the trees and grapes from the vines.

There was a Child Went Forth

Writing of a young boy he has seen, Whitman describes how, every day, as the child ventured out to look at the world around him, the objects that he saw became part of him, including “the early lilacs” and other flowers, even the song of birds, animals, and water plants. Other people also became part of him, such as “the old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the tavern,” the schoolmistress, girls and boys, and in particular the child’s own parents. Streets and houses, goods in shop windows, vehicles, horses, wharves and ferries, schooners, clouds, the smell of salt marshes, and many more things “became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.” By encountering these disparate parts of life, the child indexes them as part of himself, becoming more aware and worldly every day. 

The City Dead-House

By the gate of the city dead-house, the speaker sees the body of a prostitute deposited “on the damp brick pavement.” He looks at the body of the “divine woman” and at the ruin of the “delicate fair house,” seeing the house as more than the most majestic capitol or cathedral. As he walks on, leaving the woman and the house behind, he sheds a tear for the poor dead-house and its unhappy inhabitants. 

To Him that was Crucified

The poet calls Christ his dear brother. Many who evoke Christ’s name do not understand him, but the poet understands him without even uttering his name; indeed, he salutes Christ as a comrade and sees him as a part of all those who have come before and who “labor together transmitting the same charge.” These people, regardless of time and place, are “compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men.” They make an “ineffaceable mark upon time” and work for the cause of human love and...