does not conclude any of his major poems on a negative note. And so,
two-thirds of the way through “The Sleepers,” the persona’s tormenting
dreams suddenly cease, and they are unexpectedly replaced by luminous
visions of sleeping humanity ®owing (or dreaming that they are ®owing)
toward well-being and happiness. As the poem draws to a close, its sleep-
ers appear to have absorbed the persona’s healing dream-visions into their
own dreams; and in their dream within a dream they become freed from
pain and return to the homes of their hearts’ desires. The poem’s sudden
shift in mood and structure occurs without warning, giving the impres-
sion that the poet has combined two or more disparate draft poems into
this larger poem, the sort of radical revision he is known to have made in
some other poems.
“The Sleepers” begins in medias res, when the persona is already im-
mersed in his open-eyed clairvoyant dream, “lost to myself ”—his rational
self replaced by his subconscious dream self. The constraints that gov-
ern waking relationships do not apply in this midnight world. He feels
“confused” as he bends “with open eyes over the eyes of the sleepers”—
“ill-assorted,” “contradictory.” But the sight of his fellow dreamers renews
his conviction that the “law” of amelioration operates indiscriminately on
behalf of the living and the dead, the lover and the beloved, the murderer
and “the murdered person,” the rejected, the drunkard, the onanist, and
the insane. As we have seen, Whitman is fond of picturing the transitions
between life and death as paired birthings in which infants are born into
mortal life while the dead are born into yet another life. Thus, the per-
sona’s dream-vision reveals some dreamers passing through the “gates”
of the world of dreams into a vague hereafter while the newborn pass
through other “gates” into the known life. But his dream also reveals an
unceasing ®ow of misery and hope:
The wretched features of enuyees, the white features of corpses,
the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists,
The gashed bodies on battle¤elds, the insane in their strong-
doored rooms, the sacred idiots,
The newborn emerging from gates and the dying emerging
from gates,
The night pervades them and enfolds them.Then, in a “¤t” that is “whirling me fast,” the dreamer-persona—like a
clairvoyant healer—goes from sleeper to sleeper, reads their thoughts,
“Great Is Death” / 89