and the cohering is for it,
And all preparation is for it.. and identity is for it... and life
and death are for it.As the poem closes on a bracing note of af¤rmation, the persona ap-
pears to have drawn a magic circle of bright and con¤dent words around
himself—a protective incantation to repel the specter of doubt and the
possibility of annihilation. And Whitman, who closed each successive
edition of Leaves of Grass with lines in praise of death, closes the 1856
edition with this very “Burial Poem.”
2
“To Think of Time” hints that the vision of immortality came to the poet
in a dream. Uniquely among Whitman’s poems “The Sleepers” probes
the subconscious and takes its form from the unstructured dream pro-
cess. As James E. Miller Jr. observes, the poem opens and closes with
fragmentary images connected by the dream mode, “juxtaposed scenes
of death and love, of brutal destruction and sympathetic attachment,”
which “serve as commentaries of each other.”^16 The fusion of the per-
sona’s dreams with those of the other dreamers (the subconscious merg-
ing of the I and the you) is an effective and elegant tour de force. Like
the three poems that precede it in the ¤rst edition, this powerful lyric is
steeped in fantasies of death. Originally untitled, the poem was called
“Night Poem” in the 1856 edition, “Sleep-Chasings” (a title that conveys
the ¤tful nature of sleep) in the 1860 edition, and given its present title in
- Like the visionary persona in the massive catalogue of “Song of My-
self,” section 33, the sleeper persona enters freely into the thoughts and
feelings of men and women of the past and the present, his imagination
liberated during sleep to roam through the realms of time and space, life
and death. In some respects he resembles a clairvoyant who contacts the
spirits of the living and the dead, travels without hindrance through the
world of dreams, identi¤es with and “becomes” the other dreamers, heals
them, and makes them aware of their potential greatness and their eligi-
bility for immortality. He enters into the dreams of other sleepers and he
shares his dreams with them, so that, in a sense, their identities seem to
merge. His dreams, which are initially pleasant, give way to nightmares
of torment and dying, and his intrusion into the tragic dreams of the
other dreamers induces ever-intensifying cycles of despair. But Whitman
88 / “Great Is Death”