So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

Touch my mouth ere you depart, press my lips close, Leave me your pulses of rage—bequeath them to me—¤ll me with currents convul ...

ranks of returning soldiers to discern beneath each facial mask the inde- structible soul “as great as any... waiting secure and ...

alive.” In this dream, the “phantoms of the dead” who are “Invisible to the rest henceforth become my companions, / Follow me ev ...

decades ago: “No great man has ever wept in a nobler elegy, all the nobler because it has in it so much more than the death of o ...

songsters, heard at twilight in the dusky cedars; and with these the evening star, which as many may remember, night after night ...

is obliquely related to the tradition of what has been called nineteenth- century “mortuary music.” Beginning with the marcia fu ...

This dust was once the man, Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand, Against the foulest crime in history kn ...

impervious to decay because the facial features remained impressively lifelike many days after the assassination. In fact, the f ...

dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery when he praises the silent Union dead “who gave their lives that the nation might ...

O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides t ...

of passage.^84 The poem’s train moves across ¤elds where violets spot “the gray debris.” Violets are cheering indicators of spri ...

All over bouquets of roses, O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies, But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the ...

then, could any poet claim for undertaking such an elegy than to have communed spirit to spirit with the ill-fated president? Th ...

as it makes its westward progress one April day across the “varied and ample land,” thus mimicking the progress of human life fr ...

selfhood—to the memory of all the dead. And, indeed, Whitman dedi- cated much of his remaining life to preserving the memory of ...

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, And I i ...

gratefully nestling close to thee.” The rich musicality of the “Death Carol” and its melding of iambs, dactyls, anapests, and sp ...

Over the tree-tops I ®oat thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad ¤elds and the prairies wide, Over the ...

cur sequentially. But Whitman was intent on stretching the limits of the poetic medium by creating an illusion of synchronicity ...

The lines are intended to assuage the nation’s pain; but Whitman may have been too deeply immersed in his terrible memories of t ...