as it makes its westward progress one April day across the “varied and
ample land,” thus mimicking the progress of human life from birth to
death. “[T]he yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun burning,
expanding the air” and the impending sunset symbolize the ful¤lled life,
culminating in the advent of peaceful death. In the stanza that follows,
the sonorous ¤rst line and the three following ¤ve-stress lines with their
spondees (“just-felt,” “soft-born”) express a delight in life that gives way
(in two lines of ®owing hexameters) to the welcoming of “the coming eve
delicious” and the all-enveloping death it will bring:
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the ful¤ll’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.The sun is said to be “a central image in Egyptian funeral symbolism,
where the eye of Osiris is represented as the sun and is the symbol of the
resurrection and salvation of both the dead man and the risen Osiris.”
Jonathan Edwards’s typology characterizes “the rising and setting of the
sun [as] a type of the death and resurrection of Christ.”^91 And Whitman’s
“old age” poems employ the images of twilight, starry nights, and ap-
proaching darkness to express his patient readiness for death and his felt
certainty of immortality.
However, the two most impressive bequests that the persona bestows
on “the large sweet soul that has gone” are distinctly personal ones. First,
like an Egyptian god, he bestows his exhalation—his breath-af®atus—to
“perfume the grave of him I love”; that is, he dedicates the song he is now
singing, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” as monument to
the president and to the war dead. Similarly, Yevgeny Yevtushenko begins
his memorial poem “Babi Yar,” commemorating the thousands of Jews
slain in Kiev during World War II and ignominiously buried in the gully
of Babi Yar, with the words “There are no monuments over Babi Yar” and
dedicates his poem as a monument to them. But in addition to this in-
comparable gift of song that arises from his soul, the persona proposes
to “warble myself,” that is, to bestow and dedicate himself—his divine
“Come Sweet Death!” / 199