tional expansion.) This bacchanalia of self-torment concludes when the
tormented persona reaches a nadir of despair. He “becomes,” in rapid or-
der, the betrayed and rebellious slave whose brother, sister, and “woman”
have been sold down river where slavery is harshest. Finally he “becomes”
a sort of vengeful Moby Dick, a deadly “vast bulk” incapable of forgiving
past wrongs—the personi¤cation of the satanic element that seems to
have both repelled and attracted the poet.
To the reader’s surprise, the dream-poem and the dreamer-persona un-
dergo an abrupt change. The blithe mood of sections 7 and 8 of the poem
(roughly its last third) differ in style, temperament, and outlook from the
preceding six sections. The persona has entered into a pleasant dream-
world where he beholds visions of plenty and regains his emotional equi-
librium. The dark nightmare world dissipates as he is suddenly “over-
whelmed” by an epiphany of “something unseen... an amour of the light
and air.” He responds joyously to this unexpected contact. “I have an un-
seen something to be in contact with them also,” he announces merrily.
During this inspired moment the persona feels an equal and reciprocal
relation to the cosmos, perhaps even fancying a libidinal contact with it.
(The “contact” reference was deleted from the ¤nal edition.)^22 These con-
cluding sections depict an evolutionary parade of human souls—“the
homeward bound and the outward bound”—into whose dreams of being
“restored” and made whole again the persona enters. He beholds them
being “averaged now”—becoming specimens of perfected humanity. The
“now” during which the dreamers are transformed is ambiguous. Not
only does it signify the “now” in which the persona’s dream occurs, but it
is also the “now” in which the poet-persona recreates his dream. More
objectively, it is the eternal and abiding “now” in which this ameliorative
process is forever working. Two short catalogues describe the dreams he
shares with this endless procession of life’s winners and losers—fugitives
and poor immigrants (mostly Western Europeans) who in their dreams
are “®owing” toward their childhood homes. Dreamers whose wretched
fates are related in the earlier sections of the poem—“the beautiful lost
swimmer, the ennuyee, the onanist, the female that loves unrequited, the
moneymaker,” the sick, “the midnight widow, the red squaw, / The con-
sumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wronged”—reappear in the
closing sections as they become healed and perfected. In “the dim night
of dreams,” the persona explains, sleep has “restored them,” made them
“Great Is Death” / 93