The last two lines of the poem’s original conclusion, which were deleted
in the ¤nal edition, reiterate the poet’s faith in a cyclical journey of birth,
death, and renewal that everyone must undertake on the cosmic road to
perfection.^25
3
The last three poems of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass are suffused
with thoughts of death. The mythobiographical vignette of the boy-
poet’s nurture, “There Was a Child Went Forth,” concludes when, at the
onset of puberty, he beholds several symbols of death—the purity of twi-
light with its strata of colored clouds, and the “long bar of maroon-
tint” gleaming “solitary” at the horizon’s edge, the beckoning sea with its
“tumbling waves,” and the outbound schooner heading seaward. The op-
timistic little preachment “Who Learns My Lesson Complete” declares
that the persona is immortal, “as every one is immortal”; for “seventy
years” is not “the time of a man or woman, / Nor [is] seventy millions of
years.” And “Great Are the Myths” (later excluded from Leaves of Grass)
celebrates the persona’s zestful delight in the “myths” he associates with
all phases of existence—youth, age, the world, the self, language, truth,
democracy, goodness, and the soul—and concludes the 1855 volume of
Leaves of Grass with a solemn tribute to death:
Great is death.... Sure as life holds all parts together, death
holds all parts together;
Sure as the stars return again as they merge in the light, death
is as great as life.“Great Is Death” / 97