my hand has completely satis¤ed me.” This quasi-sexual clasp of hands
seems to trigger a mystical moment that “satis¤es” the persona and allays
his doubts about death and reality. A similar conjunction of Eros and
Thanatos occurs in “Calamus 17” (“Of Him I Love Day and Night”).
There, having dreamt that his lover was reported dead, the persona
searches throughout the land for the lover’s burial place, ¤nding only
empty houses ¤lled with spiritually dead beings. If he were to lack faith
in a meaningful existence, he concedes, he, too, would be one of the living
dead. And viewing this landscape covered with graves, he belittles the
signi¤cance of formal burial sites. In midcentury America, architecturally
designed cemeteries ¤lled with elaborate monuments to the dead had
become icons of popular culture. But the persona appears willing to spurn
cemeteries and to leave his own body” to the “corpse-cleaners,” trusting
that his soul will persevere no matter how his body is disposed of. In lines
re®ecting his certainty of the postmortem destinies of himself and his
lover, he declares:
And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently
everywhere, even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be
satis¤ed,
And if the corpse of one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly
rendered to powder, and poured into the sea, I shall be satis¤ed,
Or if it be distributed to the winds, I shall be satis¤ed.^40For if death is latent in every phase of life, he reasons, so must the prom-
ise of life be latent in death. Ironically, three decades after writing these
lines, when his own death was near, the poet ordered a costly mausoleum
for himself and his family in Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery.
In some “Calamus” poems the persona fancies that Leaves of Grass—
the book itself, or even the “Calamus” lyrics—will become an embodi-
ment of his imperishable self and serve as his passport to immortality.
“Calamus 3” (“Whoever You Are Now Holding Me in Hand”) declares
that the persona’s spirit has been transmuted into Leaves of Grass but cau-
tions the reader against presuming to penetrate his ¤nal mystery by read-
ing his printed words. In a vivid, and possibly orgasmic, fantasy, he con-
jures up the picture of a rendezvous with an unknown reader when he
or she is alone with a copy of Leaves of Grass and a postmortem manifes-
tation of the Whitman self, as a passionate bisexual lover of men and
“So Long!” / 147