earth will prove only one out of my myriads.”^15 Unable to predict “what
follows” “the death of my body,” he vows to accept whatever may come in
the hereafter, con¤dent that he will “enjoy good housing” then. Wisely
avoiding the pitfall of many contemporary religionists, who drew a virtual
map of the hereafter, he declines to describe the nature of his postmortem
“housing” or to speculate as to what sort of spirit-body he may eventually
inhabit. Many of his contemporary immortalists, as R. Laurence Moore
points out, “provided very concrete and detailed portraits of the after-
life,” and the spiritualists outdid them all. For them, says Moore, “spir-
its retained the discrete characteristics of their earthly personalities, al-
though it was widely believed that after a long passage of time they lost
contact with earth.”^16 Although the 1856 “Clef Poem” offers few speci¤cs
about the persona’s envisioned afterlife, it does spell out his expectation
of preserving his identity through whatever changes his indestructible
self may undergo. Characteristically, he articulates the hope that in the
life to come he will continue to enjoy the reciprocated love of young men
and old men and motherly women. In a striking (if somewhat juvenile)
analogy between the divine nurture of Mother Earth and whatever nur-
ture may await him in an afterlife, he speculates,
I am not uneasy but I am to be beloved by young and old men,
and to love them the same,
I suppose the pink nipples of the breasts of women with whom I
shall sleep will touch the side of my face the same,
But this is the nipple of a breast of my mother, always near and
always divine to me, her true child and son, whatever comes.“Clef Poem” may be construed as an exercise in wish ful¤llment—an
emotional bulwark against the misgivings concerning the nature of love
and death that appear to have troubled Whitman at this stage of his life.
The male and female lovers who inhabit an imagined and amorphous
afterworld represent a dream of being compensated in some future time
for the boons that mortal existence may have denied him. “Here I grew
up,” declares the persona, apparently in no hurry to ¤nd out what joys or
terrors may lurk beyond the curtain of mortality.
While calmly contemplating the starry night and the sea, the solitary
persona experiences an epiphany. During this enchanted moment, he ex-
claims, “I believe I have this night a clew through the universes,” / “And
“The Progress of Souls” / 109