may be overcome in several ways. We are, after all, in the realm of
intertwining fantasy and “reality.” Even if one submits to death, it
is always possible to drink in anticipation, imaginatively, the plea-
sure of being grieved [for], and once the pleasure is tasted, the
actual dying can be postponed into the indeterminate future.”^55It is no wonder that the serenity with which the persona appears ready to
accept his death and his readiness to abandon the known life become
tempered by the cool breeze of doubt and that he seems reluctant to take
his leave just yet. Oliver Wendell Holmes is reported to have said, “we
may love the mystical and talk much of the shadows, but when it comes
to going out amongst them with the hand of faith, we are not of that
excursion.”^56 After all, earthly life hasn’t been altogether unpleasant for
the poet or his persona, and it still promises unexplored joys. So that even
as he voices his readiness to depart this life, he still withholds his ¤nal
good-bye as long as possible. This reluctance to abandon the material
world is expressed in the aborted 1860 poem “Apostroph” where the per-
sona cries out: “O Death! O you striding there! O I cannot yet!” And like
an old-style thespian taking his ¤nal-¤nal curtain call after a long career,
the persona in “So Long!” strikes a melodramatic pose with knees bent,
arms extended, voice raised in a last tremulous good-bye before he retires:
What is there more, that I lag and pause, and crouch extended
with unshut mouth?
Is there a single ¤nal farewell?Then, as though he were about to tell a ghost story, the ostensibly
dying persona warns the reader that he may at any moment materialize
before his or her eyes. In a stunning necrosexual fantasy, the eternally
virile, eternally seductive spirit of the dead Whitman persona appears to
ready to couple with a living reader of unspeci¤ed gender. This is the
closest approach to picturing an afterlife of sensual bliss in Leaves of
Grass. In scenes of startling sexual intimacy, the ¤ve brief concluding
stanzas (lines 48 to 71 of the ¤nal version of “So Long!”) depict the os-
tensibly dead, but eternally passionate, persona approaching the living
reader in such guises as mentor, comrade, and ardent lover. Acting more
boldly toward the reader than the ®esh and blood Whitman might have
dared, the disincarnate persona announces, “From the screen where I hid,
156 / “So Long!”