Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998) asked the same questions in a different order.

Then the film invites you to reevaluate everything that came before the ending, to see what it means about the birth of man, and what we must understand about life, if we’re about to live with intention and really know what is important about living. 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”). © by owner.Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, (stanza 4): There is an under-current of dissatisfaction with things Caledonian in this fourth stanza and indeed I do not think Keats ever got entirely rid of this during the whole of the tour, albeit he enjoyed many transient visitations of true enthusiasm inspired both by fine scenery and by associations.

(stanza 2): This is a genuine autobiographic reminiscence of the time when the young Keatses lived with their grandmother after the death of their parents. I presume this piece should be dated the 3rd of July 1818.

Compare this with the Devon pieces sent to Haydon, and more particularly with The Gadfly, sent to Tom Keats a little later than this. My chief purpose in including these verses here is that students may note the variety of the pieces of this class addressed to different correspondents. 'In a letter to his sister, Keats makes a fresh start with - 'since I scribbled the Song we have walked through a beautiful Country to Kirkcudbright - at which place I will write you a song about myself.' He then proceeds with the very curious piece of doggerel now first given from the manuscript, and excuses himself on the plea of fatigue.

A song about myself poem