(Leaves, 663)
America as a democratic state and freedom of individuals was the greatest dream of Whiteman that is evident from the poems in Leave of the Grass
OI believe there is nothing real but America and Freedom!
O to sternly reject all except Democracy! (Roy, 106)
He wanted to see America free of all the evils of democracy such as corruption.
The symbol of leaves and grass itself depict the idea of independence and democracy. As leaves are free and are bound to their nature by attaching to plants in the spring and detaching in the autumn. It is their nature and no one can suppress them to act against their nature. Similarly cluster of grass is the symbol of democracy in the poetry of Whitman. By using grass the poet constructs the bond between man and nature.
In one sense the image of grass is the symbol of poet himself who like all other objects of nature himself is an independent being. Yet he himself explains the grass in the answer and question of a child "How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is/any more than he." (Song of Myself, 48) but when he give invitation to his "soul at his ease observing" the grass, he comes to know of its symbolic meaning and describes it as "flag" of disposition, "out of hopeful green stuff woven." Thus grass is the symbol of independence and liberty.
Similarly the leaves are the symbol of equality and freedom
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap's stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
The concept of Autonomy in "Paradise Lost"
In Paradise Lost, Milton gives the public role of conscience its inception at the fall. Adam's nominal role as the fore bearer of autonomous reason would appear to place him in a position of epistemological authority over Eve, whose infamous 'rebellion' against him has come to represent her own capacity for autonomous, reasoned decisions. I argue, however, that the fall, for Milton, is the story of reason's education, one that begins with Adam's belief that reason is an autonomous principle of action that derives its sense directly from God, and ends with his conviction that reason is never autonomous to begin with, but draws its sense from the drama of human relations (a conviction, I argue, that Eve has always possessed). In the fall, Milton gives us a story about the relationship between reason and embodiment, a relationship that necessarily preexists Eve's "strange / Desire of wandering," both in that Adam always depends on Eve's sense of the world to make sense of his own experience and in that any vision of the fall is a vision given with postlapsarian eyes. Adam's prelapsarian vision of reason is as illusory for him as it is for his postlapsarian readers. Reason can always imagine itself as exercising principles that need no effort of justification to deserve their intelligibility in the world. But it is here that Milton gives the figure of Eve its crucial import.
Eve is not merely a device designed to thwart Adam and propel the poem from theodicy into drama; rather, Eve challenges Adam's belief that reason is an autonomous faculty that stands apart from his experiences. Neither is she merely the embodiment of the material world and its snares and temptations. Rather, it is both in Eve's sustained curiosity about the natural world and in the primacy she gives to her relationship with Adam that Eve demonstrates reason as a phenomenally-bound activity of the mind. It is only when Adam's worldview is threatened, on the other hand, that he begins to experience the embodied center of rational activity. Because reason draws its sense from the contingent and vulnerable territory of self-understanding, it, too, is vulnerable, susceptible, as Adam comes to find, to the slanted and misleading quality of his perception -- those "imaginations" and "airy shapes" he warns Eve at the beginning of Book V must be combated with reason. There is a mode of reading the story of Adam and Eve that would see the fall as nothing other than the opportunity for blame and regret. Milton gives us something else. Before the fall Adam's sense of himself and of Eve has never been...
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