shares their dreams, and in this inspired dream-state soothes them and
heals them:
I stand with drooping eyes by the worstsuffering and restless,
I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them;
The restless sink in their beds.... they ¤tfully sleep.During this phase of his dream-trance, he imagines himself capable of
gaining a godlike perspective on the universe, viewing the world ¤rst
from a celestial height, then probing beneath the earth to glimpse the
realm of the dead. He delves “deep in the ground and sea” to view “the
shadowy shore” that all the living are destined to cross. He delights in
the beauties hidden throughout the universe. And, as his dream state in-
tensi¤es, he discovers that he has become what he calls the “ever-laughing”
pet of a “gay gang of blackguards with mirthshouting music and wild-
®apping pennants of joy!” The poem describes this “gay gang” as “nimble
ghosts, “or “journeymen divine,” who “cache and cache again deep in the
ground and sea” all sorts of “douceurs”—hidden sources of delight and
beauty that, signi¤cantly, include the beauty of death. In a trial version
of this passage, the poet wrote, “I think ten million supple wristed gods
are always hiding beauty in the world—burying it every where in every
thing—and most of all in spots that men and women do not think of
and never look—as Death and Poverty and Wickedness—Cache! and
Cache again! all over the world and heavens that swathe the earth and in
the waters of the sea—They do their jobs well; [sic] those journeymen
divine.”^17 The delightful dream-companions, with their phallic “wild-
®apping pennants of joy,” who appear to surround the dreamer-persona,
anticipate the coteries of masculine dream-companions in the death fan-
tasies of some “Calamus” poems. At another level, the “journeymen di-
vine” who guide the persona through the world of dreams may be con-
strued as his own expanded faculties, or the “secondary personality,” of
his own creative imagination.^18 Spiritualists might have identi¤ed the
“gay gang” as spirit-guides in the realm of the dead who, in this extraor-
dinary fantasy, are welcoming the dream-persona of Walt Whitman into
their domain. Dreams, of course, can serve as a medium of wish ful¤ll-
ment. Many of her subjects told Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a researcher of
paranormal phenomena, that they had undergone a death experience in
which they were led through the realm of death by guardian angels, or
“guides,” who introduced them to their deceased relations and friends,
90 / “Great Is Death”