Assuming the drop-down menu contained the following choices:
A. human beings continue to exist after death in the form of souls
B. no remnant of human life can exist after death
C. human beings continue to exist after death through the people they knew
D. some remnant of human life continues to exist after death
E. the human soul is unchangeable and immortal
F. the remains of the dead are absorbed into the soil and continue to nourish life
G. the soul and consciousness continue to exist in other living beings
<em>H. the human soul is not immortal in any way</em>
The answer is: "Walt Whitman suggests that some remnant of human life continues to exist after death (D) because the remains of the dead are absorbed into the soil and continue to nourish life (F)."
In this section of the poem, Whitman explains that the whole land and its people are connected even after death, because death is only a passage from one form to another: "there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life."
Earlier in "Song of Myself," he mentions the grass which grows on top of the dead's graves; while in this passage, he declares very clearly that people continue to live in the grass: "They are alive and well somewhere," in "the smallest sprouts."
