“real” world as well as the conventional religious idea that the known
world is a staging area that is anterior to the “real” world. Indeed, these
words are a signpost of the ongoing shift in the poet’s ideology that cul-
minates in the poem “Eidòlons” (1876) and the later prose writings—a
steady de-emphasizing of the material world and an emphasis on the
ideal, nonmaterial world.
Following “Calamus 45,” the concluding “Calamus” poem in the 1860
edition, is a simple line drawing of the sun, its beams radiating boldly,
half submerged beneath the waves, half risen above the horizon line.
Here is the ¤nal ambiguity of the “Calamus” sequence. Is the sun setting
beneath the ocean of death, one wonders, or is it rising into the daylight
of life?
4
The 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass is designed so that “Proto-Leaf”
(“Starting from Paumanok”) serves as its summarizing introduction and
“So Long!” serves as its coda and formal leave-taking. Preceded by several
death-tinged poems, some reprinted from the earlier editions, “So Long!”
constitutes the volume’s formal farewell to the reader and dramatizes the
persona’s imagined farewell to life.
Some time between 1857 and 1860 Whitman considered composing
“another Death Song? Death Song with prophecie’s [sic].” That proposed
death song became the poem “So Long!” which Allen Ginsberg, in a gust
of enthusiasm, called a “desperado farewell” by “the old soldier, old sailor,
old writer, old homosexual, old Christ poet journeyman, / inspired in
middle age to chaunt eternity in Manhattan,”^46 The poem is a three-part
recitative: Verse paragraphs 1 to 11 in the ¤nal edition summarize the
causes to which the poet has dedicated his life; verses 12 through 17 form
an intermezzo that dramatizes the persona’s impending “passing” and
voices his many farewells to the world as he “hovers just short of a de¤-
nite dissolving that would leave his body available to being represented
but not to be presented directly.”^47 The last four verses—for which the
poem is justly famous—depict the deceased persona’s imagined inti-
macy with the living reader and voice his ¤nal good-bye to his readers and
to his book. The poem’s informal title “So Long!” is de¤ned by Whitman as
“a salutation of departure, greatly used among sailors, sports, & prostitutes—
the sense of it is till we meet again—conveying an inference somewhere,
some how [sic] they will doubtless meet—sooner or later.”^48 Although the
152 / “So Long!”