he will look down on his discarded corpse by means of his spiritual eye-
sight.
O Death!
O the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few
moments, for reasons;
O that of myself, discharging my excrementious body, to be
burned, or rendered to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
My voided body, nothing more to me, returning to the
puri¤cation, further of¤ces, eternal uses of the earth.The phrase “for reasons” recurs a dozen times in Leaves of Grass and al-
ways indicates that something mysterious, something not subject to logic
or scienti¤c proof, is happening. But despite all the poetic fervor in the
above lines, the poet shows signs that he is not fully convinced by his own
vision of death and trans¤guration. By qualifying his assertion that his
“real body” will be preserved for “other spheres” with the word doubtless,
he still appears to be steeling himself against those persistent doubts that
the ultimate victory of his “impregnable” soul may be only a joyous dream.
2
None of the poems added to the 1860 edition mirror Whitman’s fascina-
tion with death with the sweep and emotional intensity of “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.”
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is framed as a “reminiscence” in
which the persona perpetually relives, or reimagines that he relives, his
portentous adolescent initiation into the mysteries of life and death that,
in turn, inaugurated his career as a poet. This Wordsworthian myth-
poem relates how the wondrous boy, the avatar of the bardic Whitman,
magically absorbs the secrets of Eros and Thanatos and is thus initiated
as America’s poet of death. Robert D. Faner has called it “an opera with-
out music,” its verbal recitatives and arias in®uenced by Italian opera;
and, like many melodramatic operas, it is a story of love, separation, and
death.^10 A lyrical prologue re-enacts the boy-persona’s emergence from
the amniotic world of his mother’s womb, his being “struck from the
®oat” of the genetic pool of life, and his setting forth in the month of
“So Long!” / 133