In "Song of Myself", Walt Whitman simultaneously Integrates the
concept of himself as an individual, Completely unique in the universe, with a
sense of himself as a composite of all life, of a kind of "divine
watcher" who floats over the surface of humanity, observing the essential
oneness of everyone within the context of their own myriad individualities. He
explicates this through many analogies, but one of his most powerful is through
his comparison of himself to the grass that still covered most of
nineteenth-century America. In this analogy, he manages to convey not only his
identity with the community of life, but his eventual participation in the
company of the dead.