"Insensate Dust": Byron & Whitman on Death

In reading Lord Byron’s “[A Fragment],” I was immediately reminded of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” There are so many conceptual parallels in the ways in which both authors articulate death. Byron assigns an earthly physicality to death, rather than discussing its tendency for spiritual transcendence like other Romantics, and even the Bible. He says the dead are nothing but “mingled millions decomposed to clay” and that we have built our societies on “ashes of a thousand Ages” (24-25). For Byron’s time, this was probably still very revolutionary—the Christian doctrine that predominated his time doesn’t acknowledge the physical nature of death, like decomposition, ashes, “becoming” earth. By the time of Whitman, this wasn’t a new idea, but was included nonetheless in his “Songs of Myself” when he describes the grass of the United States as fertilized by those who died before him. This is at once, very atomistic and yet instills a sense of community that touches on our own sense of collective mortality as humans. Byron goes on to rhetorically ask, “Where are the past—and wherefore had they birth?” (32) Unlike many of his colleagues who see the past as a mechanism of consciousness, like Hazlitt, Byron rather discusses the tangibility of the past, by suggesting the past is the earth, as all who made history before us are physically part of it now.