to mean that beneath the seeming turbulence and chaos of life there ex-
ists an undercurrent of hope and transcendence. Just as sea casts up its
jetsam of despair, so she casts up tokens of hope, such as a “limp blossom
or two.” (In “Song of Myself,” we may recall, the persona expresses his
enduring hopefulness by wearing a two-thousand-year-old blossom in
his hat.)
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil;
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves ®oating,
drifted at random;
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much, whence we come, that blare of cloud-trumpets.In this brightened mood the persona chooses to interpret the “sobbing
dirge of nature” as compassionate music that hints that nature is ulti-
mately concerned about her children. And those “cloud-trumpets” that
seem to have originated “whence we come”—that is, from the heart of
nature—betoken life’s perpetual parturitions of the living and the dead;
their hopeful sound is also the objective correlative of a “force within” and
of the persona’s inextinguishable faith.^28 Compare “The Mystic Trum-
peter” (1872), in which the speaker asks an unseen celestial trumpeter to
“sing my soul, renew its languishing faith and hope,” and to play “hymns
to the universal god from universal man.” Nevertheless, at the conclusion
of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” the persona has not yet overcome
his fears that nature’s signals may be mixed, and so he utters a ¤nal prayer
for reassurance to an unknown, and possibly capricious, god or world-
force, humbling himself like a bit of sea-chaff tossed on a barren shore:
“Whoever you are—we too lie in drifts at your feet,” he says.^29
3
The 1860 Leaves of Grass introduces two memorable sequences of love
poems. “Enfans d’Adam” (later “Children of Adam”) is a group of sensu-
ous lyrics centered on the persona’s heterosexual reproductive drive. “Cala-
mus,” which includes some of the most self-probing lyrics that Whitman
wrote, is a sequence of moving homoerotic poems marked by a profound
undercurrent of introspection and pervaded by thoughts of death.
142 / “So Long!”