lent aggressor to the bittersweet and masochistic “joys” of victims and
martyrs. He seems to relish imagining how “men die and fall and not
complain!”; “the joy of suffering... popular odium, death, face to face! /
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect
nonchalance! / To be indeed a God!” This array of purported joys implies
that to savor life fully he must exclude no experience, neither shame nor
pain, neither rejection nor ignominy, nor the ecstasies of a dying god, nor
death itself. But the supreme “joy,” the poem stresses, is meditating on
death and imagining the feeling of one’s soul being liberated from the
constraints of mortality: The following lines, although couched in general
terms, depict a joyous epiphany in which the persona anticipates the mo-
ment of dying, when his physical satisfactions will give way to the pure
delights of the soul. Like the aborted passage in “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry,” the following explanation (or revelation) of the interaction be-
tween body and soul contains trace elements of spiritualism and the
“mental science” of phrenology:
O the joy of my Soul leaning poised on itself—receiving identity
through materials, and loving them—observing characters and
loving them;
O my Soul, vibrated back to me, from them—from facts, sight,
hearing, touch, my phrenology, reason, articulation, comparison,
memory and the like;
O the real life of my senses and ®esh, transcending my senses
and ®esh;
O my body, done with materials—my sight, done with my
material eyes;
O what is proved to me this day, beyond cavil, that it is not my
material eyes which ¤nally see,
Nor my material body which ¤nally loves, walks, laughs, shouts,
embraces, procreates.A feeling of well-being “of my senses and ®esh” seems to convince the
persona that his soul is well prepared for its mystical transcendence. He
imagines the moment of his death when, “done with my material eyes”
and, “done with materials,” he can look at the world through the eyes of
his spirit. (“From the [mortal] eyesight,” says the 1855 preface, “proceeds
another eyesight.”) Then (like the dead person in “To Think of Time”),
132 / “So Long!”