#THE OMNIPRESENCE OF DEATH O.68 FREE#

An early notebook entry declares that 'our immortality is located here upon earth-that we are immortal' (qtd. Although the word 'soul' appears some 240 times in the poems-chiefly referring to the essential immortal element in one's being-his concept of the afterlife specifies no heaven, no hell, no mode of existence. Yet Whitman's stubborn faith in immortality, as he conceded, remains vague, undefined.

To describe the exit from mortal life, the poems employ a broad range of metaphors-sunsets, ebb tides, dormant seeds, and particularly 'homeward bound' and 'outward bound' journeys ('The Sleepers,' section 7) whose ultimate goal is to meet God 'on perfect terms' ('Song of Myself,' section 45). In accordance with 'The law of promotion and transformation' ('To Think of Time,' section 7), he said, 'the dead advance as much as the living advance' ('Song of the Broad-Axe,' section 4). Speculating that something drives mankind toward 'promotion' through 'birth, life, death, burial' ('To You '), he speculated that humans were 'ferried' into their mortal state from 'the float forever held in solution' ('Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' section 5), carrying with them acquired qualities from one state of existence to the next. 'In no man who ever lived was the sense of eternal life so absolute,' said Dr. Whitman perceived existence as a continuum. Because he could not hope to celebrate his own immortality without confronting the (often exhilarating, often frightening) prospect of his own mortal annihilation, the tense interplay between his fears of perishing and his convictions of eternal life endow the poems with dramatic excitement. Despite his contention that death was 'some solemn immortal birth,' a noble 'parturition' ('Whispers of Heavenly Death'), various passages in the poems suggest his fear of what Paul Tillich called 'the darkness of the no more' (537) and seem to lack a serene certainty of his own immortality. Understandably, Whitman was drawn to the drama of his own death and immortality. Perhaps because the human consciousness 'does not believe in its own death,' says Sigmund Freud, 'it behaves as if it were immortal' (296).

#THE OMNIPRESENCE OF DEATH O.68 FREE#

His postwar poems, singularly free from dramatizing the deaths of others, were largely concerned with death as a divine mystery and with the persona's dramatic awaiting of his own death. However, acknowledging that the horror of so many deaths was the central truth of the Civil War, Whitman reserved his most graphic reportage for two prose works- Memoranda During the War and Specimen Days. 'Song of Myself,' 'The Sleepers,' 'Song of the Broad-Axe,' and a few 'Drum-Taps' poems contain emotionally 'irretrievable' images of violent death in sea and land battles and in drownings.

He was drawn to injured and dying firemen and horse-car drivers-one of whom is eulogized in 'To Think of Time,' a poem which Whitman develops into a meditation on death and into a proclamation of his own immortality. He was attracted to hospitals and to scenes of violent death, apparently visiting cholera victims, whose ravaging disease was almost always fatal, as early as the 1840s. Whitman also benefited from 'a practical familiarity with disease and death which has perhaps never before fallen to a great writer' (Ellis 111). This 'very great post mortem poet' (Lawrence 17), who proclaimed that 'nothing can happen more beautiful than death' ('Starting from Paumanok,' section 12), expressed a passion for death that 'becomes the inevitable extension for life' (Dutton 3). Even deathbed watching, a practice widely believed to have instructive and moral value, had a counterpart in Whitman's vigils beside the beds of the sick and dying. Thus Whitman's generation revered George Washington largely because Parson Weems's biography of him illustrated his patient submission to death-an attitude reflected in dozens of Whitman's poems expressing his own calm readiness for death. In an era of tragically high mortality rates, the literary drama of death among writers like Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson often assumed a passionate spirit of assurance about the possibility of heaven.

Whitman's treatment of death had cultural and personal origins. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission.

The omnipresence of death o.68