not individualize the people he sees; they are usually identi¤ed only by a
name or by a national trait. Because the persona appears to be physically
distant from these peoples, observing them only from aloft, the poem
lacks the immediacy of the persona’s two extensive dream-journeys in
“Song of Myself,” sections 15 and 33. His mental journey in “Salut au
Monde!” is apparently induced by a mesmerist who (serving as his Muse)
takes his hand, hypnotizes him, and stimulates his clairvoyant powers.
The mesmerist’s spell enables the persona to relate all the “gliding won-
ders” he beholds during his trance. And as though the persona were preg-
nant with the terrestrial globe, the mesmerist demands, “What widens
within you, Walt Whitman?”—“What cities, climes, peoples?” To which
the mesmerized persona replies that he is aware of absorbing latitudes,
longitudes, and the very solar system where “the sun wheels in slanting
rings and does not set for days.” A few years before the appearance of
Leaves of Grass, an American mesmerist had explained that mesmerism
was a scienti¤c method for discovering the continuity between mind and
spirit—between the conscious and the unconscious states.^17 And the per-
sona’s conscious and unconscious states in “Salut au Monde!” do appear
to be integrated in the dream-vision that follows. The litany of conti-
nents, bays, oceans, mountain ranges, and peoples that he sees and mythic
¤gures he conjures up in this almost two-hundred-line cluster of catalogs
is redolent of the atlases and source books that Whitman had been read-
ing.^18 The persona’s globe-girdling journey is interspersed with affecting
glimpses of suffering and images of violent death, dying, and resurrection.
As he observes the “navigators of the world,” for example, he grieves for
those who drift helplessly in storms, “some with contagious diseases.” He
beholds “the battle-¤elds of the earth [where] the grass grows upon them
and blossoms and corn.” And on a rugged sea coast he beholds “the
burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors” from which “the dead men’s spir-
its when they wearied of their quiet graves might rise up through the
mounds and gaze on the tossing billows, and be refreshed by storms, im-
mensity, liberty, action.”
Midway in “Salut au Monde!” occurs an intriguing catalog—an eclec-
tic grouping of deities that illustrates how Whitman adopts Emerson’s
principle that all religious inspiration stems from a single divine source.
Having seemingly mastered time and space, the persona travels back to
mythic antiquity where he beholds an array of his avatars—gods, holy
“The Progress of Souls” / 111