portray the divinity that is inherent in each of them, that he “will paint
no head without its nimbus of [the] gold-colored light” that streams
“from the brain of every man and woman,” “effulgently ®owing forever.”
“The mockeries are not you,” he encourages them. The real “you” may be
thwarted by adverse conditions—false beliefs, empty routines, fashion-
able disguises, drunkenness, and “premature death.” But the persona as-
sures them that he sees through their masks and “mockeries” and that no
physical or moral taint can hide their ultimate worth from him:
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing
the songs of the glory of you....
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain,
passion, dissolution.The ameliorative “law,” he maintains, operates for everyone, permitting
men and women, no matter how wretched their lives may appear, to de-
velop during their lifetimes and beyond this life, to take responsibility for
their lives and their afterlives, to work out their defects, and, in the pro-
cess, to nurture the true “what you are.”
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
nothing is scanted,
Through angers, losses, ambitions, ignorance, ennui, what you
are picks its way.^11The conclusion of “To You, Whoever You Are” seeks to instill faith and
self-trust in the American populace of the 1850s, including the most
wretched of them. Its heady visionary promise of a better life in this
world and the next is the high-water mark of Whitman’s optimism.
The sixteen-line “Faith Poem” (much revised in 1871 as “Assurances”)
is a credo: ¤fteen of its lines begin with the clause “I do not doubt.” It is
predicated on the idea that every being is eligible to progress toward di-
vinity. In fact, declares its persona, his own soul tells him that a universal
spiritual democracy operates in the “majesty and beauty” that are “latent
in any iota of the world,” in the least of creatures—in “trivialities, insects,
vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse.” He revels in the
conceit that his limitless self may, in “millions of years,” develop into an
interstellar phenomenon; the in¤nitude of the universe, he feels, is mir-
104 / “The Progress of Souls”