all editions) voice the persona’s passionate appeal to the sea and to the
dear “phantoms” to reveal death’s ¤nal secret:
A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word ¤nal, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?In the poem’s original version, the sea’s utterance of the ambiguous word
death in reply to the man-child’s plea for “the key, the word up from the
waves” occurs when the persona is experiencing his worst fear—the fear
that his ultimate “destination” may indeed be “henceforth chaos” and a
meaningless death. Read in the light of the poem’s ¤nal version, this am-
biguous passage in which the sea reiterates the word death may easily be
interpreted as a con¤rmation of the persona’s faith that death embodies
the promise of renewal and perpetuity. However, the use of the present
tense in the line, “Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you
sea waves?” intimates that the adult poet-persona is still trying—and will
forever try—to decipher the sea’s message. In 1881, when Whitman was
intent on being recognized as the poet of “heavenly death,” he canceled
the troublesome 1860 passage about his feared “destination,” thus giving
the poem a positive slant.
The man-child’s demand for a further clue seemingly elicits the sea’s
intimate answer, couched in lines of supernal beauty that rock to the very
rhythm of the sea. Eros and Thanatos seem to merge in the sea’s imag-
ined response, which is accompanied by the gentle waves that provide the
persona with a measure of adolescent bliss (heightened in the later ver-
sion in which the sea “laves” him all over):
Answering the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whispered me through the night, and very plainly before
daybreak,
Lisped to me constantly the low and delicious word death...
But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet
And creeping thence steadily up to my ears,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.“So Long!” / 137