Satis¤ed that he has completed his mortal obligations, the persona pre-
pares to exit from the mortal scene.
Now acting as his own valetudinarian, the persona eulogizes himself
in the sort of ®orid style that a contemporary orator might have used in
delivering the poet’s obsequies. One can almost hear him thinking that
this is the sort of tribute I should like to hear at my own funeral. Having
bequeathed the best of himself to future generations and having seem-
ingly taken leave of mortality, the persona now celebrates the drama of
his impending “translation” to an immortal spirit whose words and image
will continue to inspire generations of readers. Sensing his impending
demise (“It appears to me I am dying”), he cries, “Now throat, sound your
last! / Salute me—salute the future once more. Peal the old cry once
more.”^50 Then poised on the brink of eternity and sounding his ¤nal “so
long!” he imagines himself dead and “screaming electric” words that will
instill his mysterious spirit-essence into future generations. Despite the
living poet’s gnawing doubts about the survival of his words, the dying
persona proclaims his faith in their enduring and un®agging inspirational
ef¤cacy, and thus he illustrates the poet Joseph Brodsky’s perspicacious
remark, “of course, a writer always takes himself posthumously.”^51
Particularly intriguing is the hint of butter®y imagery as the persona
anticipates his spirit moving “swiftly on, but a little while alighting.”
Whitman made the butter®y the signature icon of the 1860 edition. Pre-
ceding “Starting from Paumanok,” the volume’s opening poem, and fol-
lowing “So Long!,” the volume’s closing poem, is the line drawing of a
butter®y perched on the index ¤nger of a half-closed left hand, appar-
ently ready to take ®ight for the unknown, much as Whitman’s celebrated
spider launches itself from its little promontory into the unknown. And,
of course, there is the famous photograph of the seated Whitman with a
(paper) butter®y perched on his ¤nger. Whitman may have known that
butter®y wings on ancient Greek statuary represent the psyche, for as
Karl Kerényi points out, uniquely “in Greek the butter®y has the same
name as the soul,” the word psyche having originally designated the soul
and only later designated the butter®y.^52 As a symbol of death and trans-
¤guration, the butter®y is affectingly described by the immortalist Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross, who anticipates her own death arriving as “a warm em-
brace” and declares in words that Whitman might have admired:
When we have passed the tests we were sent on Earth to learn, we are
allowed to graduate. We are allowed to shed our body, which imprisons154 / “So Long!”