The persona speculates that these vanished individuals and nations may
still exist somehow without having lost their identities: “I suspect their
results curiously await in the yet unseen world—counterparts of what ac-
crued to them in the seen world [emphasis added].” And he remarks coyly:
“I suspect I shall meet them there,” the words “I suspect” indicative of a
tempered curiosity rather than a certainty concerning what “results” may
“curiously await” him in the “unseen world.” He is “curious” not only
about the relations between the living and his dead self but also about
how his altered self will be received by those he will meet in the “unseen”
realm of death. And may not those dead souls be “curiously” waiting to
¤nd out what sort of postmortal Walt Whitman they will encounter in
the hereafter?
Intimations of immortality and trans¤guration are also the theme of
“Leaves of Grass” sequence numbers 15 and 16, which illustrate Whit-
man’s tendency to express his belief in an afterlife by drawing an analogy
between the glories of the known life and the implied glories of a life
to come. In number 15 (later titled “Night on the Prairies”) the persona
¤nds himself alone at night, “¤lled with great thoughts of space and eter-
nity.” Awestruck by nature’s grandeur, he ¤nds that he is able to “absorb
[thoughts of] immortality and peace,” to “admire death and test propo-
sitions,” and to contemplate the possibility of his own blissful death. Re-
lating the wonders he beholds in the evening sky to the wonders he may
yet behold in his future existence, he reasons that just as some stars re-
main invisible to his unaided sight, so there must be splendid undiscov-
ered realms of existence beyond the known life. “O! I see now that life
cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,” he exclaims; “I see that I am
to wait for what is exhibited by death.” “Leaves of Grass 16” (later titled
“The World below the Brine”) compares the brutish “dumb swimmers”
and the “sluggish existences” that inhabit the primitive undersea world
and the sea change from their world to the superior world of civilized
humanity. And then the analogy is extrapolated to indicate the quantum
change that he conjectures will occur across the countless eons in the
change from mortal existence to the life in “other spheres.” In a fragmen-
tary notebook entry that parallels “The World below the Brine,” Whit-
man observes “that our immortality is located here upon earth—that we
are immortal—that the processes of re¤nement and perfection of the
earth are in steps, the least part of which involves trillions of years—that
in due time the earth beautiful as it is now will be as proportionately
128 / “So Long!”