Grass Grows, Birds Fly, People Die

The symbolism employed with the appearance of the question “What is the grass?” comes evident with the illustration of the bunches of grass in the child’s hands. This image becomes a symbol of universal regeneration: “Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation” (98). This rebirth of nature might allude to the color of grass itself, green. Green evokes hope. The dollars are green, making the color a symbol of America itself. But what is the grass? But grass also symbolizes union: the lone material that links the people from all over America, and consequently, all over the world. Grass grows everywhere, grass grows by itself. It also evokes democracy. Grass, like democracy, is equal everywhere. Throughout the United States, grass grows equally, just as democracy. Egalitarianism rests analogous within every corner of a nation.

But grass is also the receptacle of all dead bodies of the nation, and the world. In the leaves of grass rest the common people of the world. When thinking in terms of America, when invoking death we relate to the Civil War. In the wake of the Civil War, we can relate grass to the graves of the many thousands who died in native floor: the grass feeds on the bodies of the dead. Hence, these deaths signify that, eventually, everyone must die, and so the natural roots of democracy lay in mortality itself, whether due to natural causes or warfare bloodshed. Still, grass might encompass everything, or signify nothing. Here, the narrator suggests this: “I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps” (113-114). The mystery after death is what feeds democracy. And the result of these deaths, unfortunately, was the emergence of the greatest democracy of nowadays. In a leaf of grass we encounter everything. A leaf of grass is no less than the path a flap of a butterfly’s wings in Korea to set off a tornado in America.