That the above passage represents both a physical and a spiritual union
with his reader/lover is con¤rmed by the persona’s strange feeling of be-
ing “immerged from head to foot” during their union. To immerge means
literally to dissolve or to disappear into a homogenized liquid, and this
choice of words suggests the completeness of the persona’s sexual and
spiritual union with the reader. Even though this weighty term appears
rather jarring in the context of a simply worded passage, the concept of
immergence was particularly signi¤cant to some of the century’s reli-
gious revisionists, who contended that it was a more accurate term than
the word baptism. In this light the above passage may be construed as a
mutual baptism—the spirit of the living reader is being baptized by, or
merged into, the spirit of the deceased Whitman persona, while the per-
sona’s spirit undergoes a reciprocal renewal through its immersion into
the spirit of the living reader. Some internal evidence exists for interpret-
ing this act of immergence as one of reciprocal baptism. In “Song of the
Answerer” (1856), the persona poses as “the Answerer,” a godlike being,
whose “word is decisive and ¤nal, / Him they accept, in him lave, in him
perceive themselves, as amid light, / Him they immerse, and he immerses
them [emphasis added].”^61 However, Whitman’s verbal game play leaves
one hard-pressed to draw a dividing line between the sexual and the
spiritual elements of the passage. In accordance with his practice, he
does not identify the “signi¤cant other” in the persona’s ghostly union.
Granted, it may be anyone, real or imagined. But if we choose to view the
persona as an inspired being who exults in his own potential godliness—a
stance he assumes in several poems—may he not be expressing a dra-
matic yearning to amalgamate with a Being that is in¤nitely greater than
himself? May he not be seeking a union with a spiritual “spouse”^62 by
dissolving, or “immerging,” into the very godhead and thus becoming
part of the divine essence—the central idea in “Passage to India”? Given
the boldness of this fantasy, may not the persona be envisioning that as
he dissolves into his divine lover, his divine lover is reciprocally dissolving
into him, while his spirit retains its identity, and he becomes God—the
God he aspires to meet and to surpass, according to certain passages in
“Song of Myself”? Must we necessarily assume that his partner in this
imagined merging, or immersing, is a mortal being? In fact, a startling
1860 lyric pictures the persona walking as a companion to Christ, both of
them “saturat[ing] time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages
158 / “So Long!”