Leaves of Grass

In later editions this poem underwent many minor revisions and was given several different titles. In the second edition in 1856, it was titled “Poem of Faces.” Whitman settled on the title “Faces” in 1871.

The poem presents a whole range of faces, from beautiful to ugly. The speaker’s interest, as always, is in the common people he observes on his walks and his travels on byroads and on the ferry. Admiring them without judgment is part of his lifelong vision of democracy. 

However, the speaker also seeks to penetrate beyond appearances to a deeper reality. Even the most grotesque face—“This face is a dog’s snout sniffing for garbage; / Snakes rest in that mouth” (Lines 20-21)—does not define a person’s inner life. The speaker refuses to be fooled by this surface trait: “I see neath the rims of your haggard and mean disguise” (Line 38). The speaker has visited people in extremis: The man he describes as the “smeared and slobbering idiot they had at the asylum” reminds him of his brother. Whitman’s brother Eddy was born in 1835, when Whitman was 16, had an intellectual disability. Whitman looked after Eddy and they shared a bed in the family home. In the poem, the speaker looks forward to a better time when no one has to endure the mistreatment his brother faced:

I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother,

The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen tenement;

And I shall look again in a score or two of ages,

And I shall meet the real landlord, perfect and unharmed, every inch as good as myself. (Lines 43-46)

Whitman’s work often alludes to the long march of time in an evolutionary direction toward mystical perfection. He is deeply sensitive to the evidence of suffering he observes in the stricken faces around him, but he knows that their conditions are temporary. He uses the metaphor of a military march, complete with “victorious drums” (Line 51) to convey progress under the leadership of the Lord or Master—a divine figure. He also uses the metaphor of the body as a house. While Eddy lived as a “fallen tenement” beset by the “agents” of mental illness, he will eventually be transformed into “the real landlord”—the soul or self that is “perfect and unharmed” and equal to Whitman. Later in the poem, the metaphor recurs: “In each house is the ovum . . . . it comes forth after a thousand years. / Spots or cracks at the windows do not disturb me” (Lines 59-60).

The poem ends on a note of serenity and fulfillment, with the image of the old Quaker woman, her face beautiful; as she rests in her armchair, “The sun just shines on her old white head” (Line 80). She is dressed in the products of love, family, and hand labor: For the linen gown she is wearing, “Her grandsons raised the flax and her granddaughters spun it with the distaff and the wheel” (Line 82). These final images convey “the melodious character of the earth” (Line 83) in which the truth that temporarily hides beneath the blemishes is visible on people’s faces.