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Which phrase could be applied to both the grass in “Song of Myself” and the stars in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”?

A) brief, but eternal
B) tiny, but powerful
C) simple, but complex
D) beautiful, but dangerous

1 Answer

4 votes

Answer:

The correct option is C) Simple but Complex.

Step-by-step explanation:

In "Song of Myself", we see that the writer uses the word grass several times. From the point of view of the above question, we are forced to look at the grass from a metonymical point of view.

Verse 6 for instance shows the writer referring to the grass as the child of the vegetation (line 7) and then in line 12 he calls it the "uncut hair of graves".

In lines 13-16, he shifts his paradigm of the grass again, calling it a uniform hieroglyphic (that is some sort of coded language) that unifies people of different colors and political orientations.

Hence, the grass by an account of the multiplicity of the above paradigms ceases to be just grass but many other things as indicated by the writer of the "Song of Myself"

In the Learn'd Astronomer, the poem ends with the writer looking up in perfect

silence at the stars, his gaze, an awestruck wonder (see line 7 where he describes the night as mystical) at how sitting on the earth these tiny twinkling starts are same as the enormous complicated entities described in lines 2 and 3.

Hence their simplicity and simultaneous complexity.

Cheers

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