beautiful, and brought them peace. But the world of “The Sleepers” is
only the persona’s dream world; and within this dream the sleepers are
gravitating toward peace and perfection. As he often does, Whitman
pairs physical improvement with spiritual development:
The myth of heaven indicates the soul;
The soul is always beautiful.... it appears more or it appears
less.... it comes or lags behind,
It comes from its embowered garden and looks pleasantly on
itself and encloses the world;
Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, and perfect
and clean the womb cohering,
The head wellgrown and proportioned and plumb, and the
bowels and joints proportioned and plumb.The soul is always beautiful,
The universe is duly in order.... every thing is in its place,
What is arrived is in its place, and what waits is in its place;
The twisted skull waits.... the watery or rotten blood waits,
The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the child
of the drunkard waits long, and the drunkard himself waits long,
The sleepers that lived and died wait.... the far advanced are
to go in their turns, and the far behind are to go in their turns,
The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall ®ow and
unite.... they unite now.This vision of an ongoing process of physical and spiritual perfecti-
bility once again invites the question of how the upgrading of the carnal
and corrupt body serves to advance the development of the immortal
soul. Traditional religionists have sometimes contended that the body
must be disciplined or subdued as a means of liberating the soul from the
tyranny of the ®esh. The poet who declares in “Song of Myself” that he
doesn’t mind contradicting himself sometimes implies that the soul is
identical with the body (hence the body is to be nurtured) and at other
times implies that the body is somehow distinct from the soul (hence it
is ultimately disposable). But Whitman, like many contemporary reform-
ers, respected physical culture as a component of spiritual nurture, as-
suming that developing a healthy body promotes spiritual well-being. In
94 / “Great Is Death”