In another nightmare he beholds the drowning of “a beautiful gigantic
swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea” only to be
dashed against the rocks and borne out to sea—a swimmer with a “white
body,” “undaunted eyes,” “a courageous giant... in the prime of his
middle age.” This swimmer’s death is all the more poignant when we
recognize that his physical attributes strikingly resemble those recorded
in the various self-descriptions of the six-foot tall, fair-complexioned,
keen-eyed, thirty-six-year-old Walt Whitman who, in the prime of his
middle age, boasted (in poetic passages, prefaces, and self-written re-
views) of his perfect body, his perfect health, and his love of swimming.
Although it is possible that the poet had witnessed such a drowning, the
poem’s swimmer is a surrogate of the Whitman dream-persona as he
imagines his own death by drowning. This vision of death by water is
consistent with various passages of Leaves of Grass in which the per-
sona “becomes” a garroted concertgoer, a mashed ¤reman, an incinerated
widow, a disembodied “Whitman,” or another drowning swimmer. The
dream-persona’s nightmare then spirals farther downward (in a possible
reworking of a newspaper report) as he delves into his past to recall his
helplessness when he supposedly witnessed a ship foundering offshore
one frosty, moonlit night, its passengers drowning and he able only to
wring his ¤ngers and to “help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in
a barn” the next morning.^21 By juxtaposing the drowning of the Whitman-
like swimmer with the drowning of the helpless ship’s passengers one can
perceive the emotional depth of the persona’s fantasy of his death by
drowning. The tragic dream veers again from the personal into the quasi-
historic past as the persona envisions the grieving specter of General
Washington, defeated at the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, as he gazes upon
the ¤eld of dead soldiers who had been entrusted to his command; and
in another vision he sees the weeping general bidding farewell to his
adoring of¤cers when the war is over. Then, with a sad nostalgia for the
vanished world of childhood innocence, the persona recalls his mother’s
account of a visit by a “red squaw,” a Native American woman of “won-
derful beauty and purity,” at a time when the mother was herself still a
pubescent girl, and he shares her sense of loss as though her pain was his
own. (Both Leaves of Grass and Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha were pub-
lished in 1855, during an expansionist era when indigenous Americans
were being uprooted and their lands devastated, and the theme of the
vanishing noble Indian had become a clichéd literary apologia for na-
92 / “Great Is Death”