moving symbolically from life to death. Indeed, traveling “from east to
west” is hardly the fastest route by which to return them to the lands of
their European origin. One recalls, perhaps with a shock, that this dream
prophecy is not intended to be ful¤lled in a few human lifetimes but
only “in a score or two of ages.” Nevertheless, if the poem’s sleepers have
become “invigorated” by the dream they shared with the persona, the
dream itself may have enabled them to confront their own lives—and
their deaths—with greater courage and nobler aspirations. Likewise,
“The Sleepers”—the poem itself—may continue to inspire readers with
a stronger sense of their physical and spiritual potential.
The metaphor of sleep necessarily implies an awakening. The sleeper’s
dream state complements his waking state. The persona’s declaration
upon awakening from his dream that “I will stop only a time with the
night... and rise betimes” may simply mean that Walter Whitman Jr., as
a representative American, will awaken early (“betimes”) from his slum-
ber to go about his daily affairs. But the assertion that he will “arise be-
times” can also indicate his faith in a destined rebirth. For in its archaic
usage, “betimes” means “at the right time” or “at the appointed time.” The
awakening from sleep has long served as an emblem of Christian resur-
rection. Thus Jonathan Edwards declared that just as “this sleep is an
image of death that is repeated every night; so the morning is the image
of the resurrection; so the spring of the year is the image of the resurrec-
tion that is repeated every year.”^24 “The Sleepers” ends with the persona’s
awakening from the amniotic realm of dreams “in which I lay so long”
and by which “I have been well brought forward by you”—the “you” (per-
soni¤ed as Mother Night-Sleep-Death) who had enfolded him and has
now liberated him. This reappearance of the mother ¤gure and the refer-
ence to her once again exempli¤es Whitman’s use of birth imagery to
describe the transitions from life to death and from death to life. “The
Sleepers” ¤ttingly concludes with the persona’s address to the mystic Ma-
triarch of the World of Dreams and Death who is his muse and whom
he desires to revisit in further excursions into the world of dreams:
I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return to you;
Not you will yield forth the dawn again more surely than you
will yield forth me again,
Not the womb yields the babe in its time more surely than I
shall be yielded from you in my time.96 / “Great Is Death”