that begins with the mesmerist’s cry, “O take my hand Walt Whitman!”
ends with the persona’s high-¤ve gesture—“I raise high the perpendicular
hand, I make the signal.”
A similar gesture concludes “Song of the Open Road, “in which the per-
sona offers to take the hand of his “eleve,” “or “Camerado,” in order to
launch him or her along the timeless road of existence. Whether it is
described as a “public road,” a “long brown path” or a city street in this
impressive and affecting poem of more than 220 lines, the road is a com-
plex of metaphors for the route that each one must ¤nd to achieve self-
realization. It leads (in words that pre¤gure Whitman’s “old age poems”)
toward the “sublime old age of manhood or womanhood... ®owing free
with the delicious near-by freedom of death” and toward spiritual growth.
Each journey, we are assured, is unique: “not I—not God—can travel this
road for you.” Like the “men of subdued minds and conquered passions”
described in the Bhagavad Gita, Whitman’s “traveling souls” may even as-
pire to become “godly pilgrims” and enter upon the “never-failing” Brah-
minic path “that leads to supreme happiness.” “The procession of time,”
as Frederick William Conner explains, “was destined never to arrive at a
¤nal resting place, but to be forever on the march, ¤nding a new goal be-
yond each one attained.”^29 Following an episode of spiritual enlightenment
that the preternaturally sensitive persona experiences at the beginning of
the poem, he discovers that embedded in the road—the macrosymbol for
life’s path that each of us must choose to pursue—are countless micro-
symbols, analogous to the ®ower in the crannied wall or the blade of
grass. “From the living and the dead,” says the emblem-deciphering per-
sona to the road, “I think you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and
the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.” Whitman
trusts to sensory data to reveal higher truths. “A knowledge of [emblem-
atic material] images,” says, Perry Miller, “would be a knowledge not of
spiritualized commonplaces but of truth acquired in the only place where,
after Locke, it was possible to ¤nd it, in sensible experience. To under-
stand the relation of image to truth would be nothing less than to make
one’s calling and election sure.” More bluntly, Jonathan Edwards declared
that “external things are intended to be images of things spiritual and
divine.”^30 And Whitman’s “road” does indeed appear ready to divulge its
secrets to the persona through his Kantian double consciousness—his
capacity to absorb and to process both practical knowledge and spiritual
data. The persona assures those traveling the road that they, too, may
116 / “The Progress of Souls”