mysteries,” said the Mahatma. “If death is not a prelude to another life,
the intermediate period is a cruel mockery.”^14 But Whitman’s lines are
whimsical, if not paradoxical. How can the persona admit the possibil-
ity of his annihilation and, at the same time, depict himself as “well-
suited”—well dressed and ¤tted for robes of glory in the afterlife? His
mortal body may be perishable, but he seems to believe that his essential
self remains impervious to decay. Observe the relevance of the “well-
suited” persona and the grass as symbols of immortality to the familiar
words from Matthew 6:28–30: “And why be anxious about clothes? Con-
sider how the lilies grow in the ¤elds; they do not work; they do not
spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his splendor was not attired like
one of them. If that is how God clothes the grass in the ¤elds, which is
there today and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, will he not all the more
clothe you?”
Whitman generally makes his case for immortality in Leaves of Grass
in one of three ways: by describing the grandeurs of nature and the
known life and extrapolating from them the possible grandeurs that may
follow in the unknown life; by asserting the validity of the persona’s in-
tuitions into immortality, often augmented by episodes of epiphany and
illumination, like that in section 5 of “Song of Myself ”; and by describing
a leap of faith, like that of “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (1868). William
James, who admired Whitman’s healthy world view, suggests that the best
recourse in confronting the contradictory evidence regarding humanity’s
eventual destiny might be to make such a leap. (Like many ¤n de siècle
intellectuals who were disturbed by the challenge of scienti¤c rationalism
to their faith in personal immortality and who sought idealistic alterna-
tives, James eventually became a devotee of spiritualism.) “To Think of
Time” re®ects the poet’s continued struggle to dispel his troubling doubts
concerning a future life. But his underlying faith remained strong, and he
was never in serious danger of lapsing into skepticism or a permanent
state of despair. So we cannot accept at full value the persona’s melodra-
matic declaration that “if I were to suspect death I should die now,” for
few people of Walt Whitman’s robust constitution have ever perished
because they feared that they might not be immortal. Arch-skeptic Mark
Twain went so far as to say that “there may be a hereafter, and there may
not be. I am wholly indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again, I
feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to ®ounder
about for ages in a lake of ¤re and brimstone for having violated a con-
86 / “Great Is Death”