The Smallest Sprout Shows There Is

From Section 6 of "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass, the pivotal section in which a child asks Whitman "What is the grass?" and the poet meditates on the grass as a symbol of the cycle of life and death. The surrounding lines read: "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier." Whitman's Transcendentalist philosophy holds that matter and spirit are indestructible — death is not an ending but a transformation, and every sprout is evidence of that continuous renewal.