and brought them through a passageway or gate (the sort of symbol
Whitman so often associates with the “passage” to death) to catch a
glimpse of the god of their choice!^19
In a later phase of his dream, the persona merges with and “becomes”
the very dreamers he is looking at. Thus he shares the dreams of both a
bride and her male lover. In this sexual fantasy, the lover seems to melt
into the darkness (traditionally associated with death), permitting the
persona, in turn, to become the bride’s surrogate lover. We cannot tell
whether the persona has subconsciously destroyed the lover in order to
replace him, but in his dream the lover’s disappearance triggers a vision
in which he pursues the lover and searches for him in the realm of death
by means of his sonarlike powers:
My hands are spread forth.. I pass them in all directions,
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.The despondency triggered by the despairing dream of the abandoned
bride and her lost lover initiates a descending spiral of terrifying night-
mares. One disturbing dream revisits the trauma that had accompanied
the onset of adolescence—the “®ooding” of sexual desire and the shame
induced by masturbation or by the involuntary nocturnal emissions—the
spermatorrhea that sexual reformers deplored as debilitating and sinful.
No wonder the dreamer-persona complains of sexual exhaustion, lament-
ing that “my sinews are ®accid.” As he relives this guilty memory he feels
himself descending “my western course” toward death. (Whitman ex-
cluded this passage from the ¤nal edition of Leaves of Grass because it
could have proved objectionable at a time when America’s public cen-
sor Anthony Comstock had threatened to jail the civil libertarian Ezra
Heywood for daring to reprint sexually explicit passages from Leaves of
Grass.)^20
The persona’s nightmares become increasingly traumatic. Imagining
himself to be the very shroud that covers a buried body, he cries out in
despair that even the most sordid mortal existence is preferable to the
obscurity of death:
It seems to me that everything in the light and air ought to
be happy;
Whoever is not in his cof¤n and the dark grave, let him know he
has enough.“Great Is Death” / 91