Its Simply A Bunch Of Grass, It Signifies Nothing

As I continue reading Walt Whitman’s poems in Leaves of Grass, I start noticing something about the structure of his lines. After some reading, I wanted to take a break and started scrolling down pretty fast to see if anything caught my attention. I started to see how Whitman always started his sentences with the same word. Not that all the lines in his poems start with the same letter, but out of nowhere he goes 10 straight lines starting with I and then with The or Do, If, A and others like this. For example on poem 15, which is one of the longest ones, he starts with The almost the whole poem. This is another thing about his style that I noticed and wanted to write down.

There was one particular poem that really caught my attention because of what it said and because of its length. It is poem 17 which goes like this:

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands—they are not original with me;
If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing;
If they are not the riddle, and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing;
If they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is;
This is the common air that bathes the globe.

This poem said a lot of things to me. Walt Whitman had a very original, defined style, in fact we were talking about clichés in class and I couldn’t fins almost any in his work. Starting with his title, Leaves of Grass, he gives it a very original style, I mean, who would dare to call them Leaves and not blades as the rest of the people do. What Whitman says in this poem is that people are not original, and that they actually nothing. This remembered me of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and how in Act 5 Scene 5 he says the famous phrase, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Line30) it is the same as Whitman says, that those not original, are nothing, if you are not the one creating a riddle but trying to solve it, you are nothing. Then he talks about the grass, and this is a metaphor about the people, and how they all grow together the same, and that is why only few can be different from the rest.