Like similar af¤rmations in Leaves of Grass that are rooted in personal
feelings, the speaker uses the expression “I know” more or less inter-
changeably with “I feel” or “I dream.” Avoiding explanations, dogma, and
logic, he is content to be the mystic drummer who leads this hopeful
parade along the open road, testing the validity of his assumptions in the
alembic of his own feelings.
4
The third poetic journey, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is the masterpiece
of the 1856 edition and the only extended depiction of the postmortem
persona in Leaves of Grass. In the poem the persona hovers above the East
River long after he has shed his mortal body, but the reader never learns
what sort of “body” he now possesses. Indeed, he seems to be almost a
disembodied consciousness, still endowed with the powers of perception,
memory, and sympathy. Like the mortal persona, he can still experi-
ence beauty, libidinal urges, and a desire for companionship. Yet how this
seemingly disembodied entity can experience the thoughts and sensa-
tions that scientists tell us are processed by the perishable brain and the
nervous and endocrinal systems of mortal beings is never clari¤ed. If the
dead no longer have the bodily functions that they had in life, asks a critic
of immortality, how can they exercise physical memory or experience the
same feelings as do the living?^32 And if one’s soul could survive without
the body, declares the skeptic Corliss Lamont, it would necessarily be
deprived of all bodily sensations and functions. The sort of physiologi-
cally rooted consciousness exhibited by the persona in “Crossing Brook-
lyn Ferry,” he would argue, cannot exist independent of the (biologi-
cal) sensory organs. Although the combination of disembodiment and
memory, or disembodiment and sensual perception, appears to be un-
likely, if not impossible in scienti¤c terms, the disembodied Whitman
persona’s chief bond to the living in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is pre-
cisely his retention of those seemingly unimpaired mental functions.
Nevertheless, the poem’s premise that one’s mortal faculties may be re-
tained following death was consistent with the reasoning of such spiritu-
alists as Andrew Jackson Davis, who declared rather ®oridly: “Believe not
that what is called death is a ¤nal termination to human existence, nor
that the change [from life to death] is so entire as to alter or destroy the
constitutional peculiarities of the individual... but believe righteously,
118 / “The Progress of Souls”