selfhood—to the memory of all the dead. And, indeed, Whitman dedi-
cated much of his remaining life to preserving the memory of the presi-
dent, the war, and all its casualties.
Following this episode, the persona ¤nds himself in the dusky woods,
where, for the third time, he encounters the thrush, which he calls a
“wondrous singer” and his “dearest brother,” and which, like him, is said
to be endowed with a “voice of uttermost woe.” The “Hermit Thrush
Solitary Thrush,” Whitman wrote in a manuscript note on birds, is “very
secluded”; its “song is a hymn—real seriously sweet”; “it is the bird of the
solemn woods & of nature pure and holy.”^92 The persona is prepared to
undertake his descent into the realm of death, but before he does so he
must conclude his period of mourning and attain the serenity in which
his mind is open to inspiration. He must end his ¤xation on “the long
black train” and on the black cloud of grief “enveloping me with the rest.”
This is Emily Dickinson’s “letting go.” For “normal mourning, too, while
it lasts,” says Freud, “absorbs all the energies of the ego.”^93 Once the per-
sona has attained a state of calm, the song of his spirit can join with the
song of the bird to sing “Death’s outlet song of life.” Whitman’s careful
language makes clear that the persona’s encounter with the thrush oc-
curs as an enchantment or a dream-vision. In declaring that “the charm
of the [bird’s] carol rapt me,” the persona af¤rms that he is under a spell,
for in nineteenth-century usage the words “charm” and “rapt” were asso-
ciated with the mesmerized or hypnotic state. The voice of the bird,
which is the voice of nature, and the voice of the poet, who is his na-
tion’s inspired singer, can now unite in a mystic harmony to chant their
incomparable hymn of welcome to death. Their celebration of death, as
James E. Miller Jr. phrases it, “paradoxically bestows birth—a rebirth into
a spiritual life” during which the persona’s voice, which had been muted
by grief, is restored.^94
As the persona prepares to descend into the mysterious dark swamp to
meet death face to face, as it were, he senses that he is being accompanied
by two dim presences—the “thought of death,” a representation of the
grief and loss experienced by death’s living survivors, and by “the sacred
thought of death,” his conviction that death is a necessary element of the
cosmic plan. That these mystic companions are phantoms—the shadowy
projections of the persona’s own thoughts—is made clear by the poet’s
use of similes in which the persona describes himself “as walking” with
these dim ¤gures, “as with companions.”
200 / “Come Sweet Death!”