Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the
hands of companions,
I ®ed forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in
the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.The swampland he enters to hear the bird’s carol is a realm of darkness
and decay, but, paradoxically, it is also a lush source of primal life, of the
vast oozy composts that generate perpetual renewal. The “shores of the
water,” “the hiding receiving night,” and the “cedars and ghostly pines”
are all images suggesting that he has descended into the spirit-realm
of death. Helen Vendler views the swamp as “a distinctly watery under-
world... doing duty for Hades, for the realm of the ghosts and the
shades,” and for the mythic realm of death that Whitman sometimes
associates with the watery realm of the sea.^95 But like Whitman’s image
of the “compost ” and like Thoreau’s image of the primal mud surrounding
Walden Pond that teems with emergent life during the springtime thaw,
Whitman’s swamp represents a place of metamorphosis—a realm in
which death and decay perpetually nurture life and renewal.
Once the mystic threesome has descended into the swamp’s recesses
the enchanted persona hears (and silently intones) the bird’s carol in
praise of Death. In the 1871 edition, the seven quatrains of birdsong were
captioned “death carol” and were italicized, thus conferring upon them
the status of an extended aria or, as the poet calls them at the poem’s
close, a “powerful psalm in the night.” The heart of the “psalm,” born of
Whitman’s having witnessed the prolonged and painful deaths of sol-
diers, is a prayer beseeching “lovely... soothing... delicate death” that
when she “must indeed come” to each person, to “come unfalteringly,” that
is, unaccompanied by prolonged suffering. Death is pictured as the “cool-
embracing” Mother Sea who (ideally) gently folds all of us to her bosom—
the sea whose soothing “undulations” are an anodyne for mortal pain and
whose chartless pathways are the implied roads to eternal life. The “carol”
endows death with an almost physical intimacy as the persona anticipates
the “feel,” the very sensation, of his own eventual embrace by Mother
Death, “the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death, / And the body
“Come Sweet Death!” / 201