So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

our soul the way a cocoon encloses the future butter®y, and when the

time is ripe we can let go of it. Then we will be free of pain, free of

fears, and free of worries... free as a beautiful butter®y returning

home to God... which is a place where we are never alone, where

we continue to grow and sing and dance, where we are with those

we loved, and where we are surrounded with more love than we can

ever imagine.^53

For Whitman, too, the butter®y symbolizes the passage to death, which
he addresses as “the translateress” and “the ¤nale of visible forms.”^54 Like
the closing lines of “Song of Myself,” in which the persona bequeaths
himself “to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love,” the lines signaling
the departing persona’s self-bestowal in “So Long!”—“Sparkles hot, seed
ethereal, down in the dirt dropping”—are also framed in seed-sprouting
imagery to indicate the belief in a spiritual resurrection. And like the
herbage growing from the breast of the dead Osiris that, according to
myth, is transformed into armed men, the words of the dying persona in
“So Long!” also seem destined to sprout into “troops out of me rising”—
the “athletic” and poetic men and women who will inhabit a future
America. Although desiring to retain his mortal voice for as long as he
possibly can, the persona seems eager for whatever transformation his
“passing” may bring:

So I pass—a little time vocal, visible, contrary,

Afterward, a melodious echo, passionately bent for—death

making me undying,

The best of me then when no longer visible—for toward that I

have been incessantly preparing. [emphasis added]

He ¤nds comfort in the thought that when he has become “no longer
visible” he will still enjoy the bittersweet pleasure of being mourned by
generations of readers and lovers yet unborn. But, as Henry Staten ob-
serves, the expectation of being remembered is subject to an uncertain
outcome, because the living can only imagine whether, or how, future gen-
erations may love them or grieve for them:

The ®aw in the libidinal logic of the desire to be mourned

for lies, of course, in the fact that the dead cannot enjoy the trib-

ute of grief that their death occasions: a serious ®aw, but one that

“So Long!” / 155