So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

a cadre of physically developed moral exemplars and visionaries—what
he calls a “breed of the best”—who will inspire the masses to understand,
and to pursue, their potential for better lives here and in the hereafter.^10
But the persona’s con¤dence is pierced by disquieting moments in
which he fears that he may have misread the book of life and death, and
that if his expectations were to prove wrong his mortal life would culmi-
nate in the dreaded nothingness that Paul Tillich calls “the darkness of
the no more.”^11 Two millennia earlier, the poet-philosopher Lucretius had
described just such a mood of frightened despair: “When in life each man
pictures to himself that it will come to pass that birds and wild beasts
will mangle his body in death, he pities himself; for neither does he sepa-
rate himself from the corpse, nor withdraw himself enough from the out-
cast body, but thinks that it is he, and as he stands watching taints it with
his own feeling.”^12 And two centuries before the appearance of Leaves
of Grass, the poet John Dryden had described the feeling of agonizing
uncertainty concerning the nature of the afterlife. Betrayed and facing
death, the hero of one of his tragedies declaims:

Distrust and darkness of a future state

Make poor mankind so fearful of their fate.

Death in itself is nothing, but we fear

To be we know not what, we know not where.^13

When he is momentarily stunned by the thought that death may bring
him neither “satisfaction” nor continuity, the Whitman persona protests
bitterly against the possibility of annihilation, but still clings to his belief
that no such fate could befall him:

If otherwise, if all these things came but to ashes of dung;

If maggots and rats ended us, then suspicion and treachery

and death.

Do you suspect death? If I were to suspect death I should die now,

Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward

annihilation?

The rhetorical questions in the second couplet are not far removed from
a sentiment uttered by Mahatma Gandhi. “Both birth and death are great

“Great Is Death” / 85