self addresses his soul in “Darest Thou Now O Soul” as though the self
were both identical with and distinctive from the soul. The poem an-
nounces the persona’s readiness, as the mortal “ties loosen,” to quit his
earthly mooring for his—and his soul’s—imagined journey to the “in-
accessible land” where there are no constrictions of time, space, or hu-
man fallibility and where there is no “darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any
bounds bounding us”:
Then we burst forth, we ®oat,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to ful¤l O soul.^6These lyrics do not clarify the distinction between the “we” or the “us”
who seem to be paired, yet remain discrete, in the imagined afterlife. If
the soul is an intangible essence that is impervious to death, and if the
mind or the consciousness, as is generally assumed, has a physiological
basis that ceases to function at the moment of death, then the reader is
left to ponder what may be the nature of the disembodied self that ac-
companies the immaterial soul on its transcendent journey. Whitman
imagined a postmortem self that retains recognizable vestiges of his mor-
tal personality and that appears to tag along with (or perhaps merge with)
his soul in the next world. The fear that had surfaced in earlier poems—
that death may be only the eternal nothingness—has now become subli-
mated into a faith in an afterlife during which elements of the con-
scious (mortal) identity are somehow preserved. Although the persona
fancies himself destined to live in an idealized postmortem world, he ap-
pears to be in no hurry to begin his journey there. Beneath the many
proclamations of his readiness to embark from the earthly shore, one can
sometimes hear the whistling of a boy who is afraid to dip his foot into
the chilly waters of doubt. Thus while praying to be wafted “tenderly”
through the exit door of the house of life, he complains (in “The Last
Invocation”) that “Strong is your hold, O mortal ®esh, / Strong is your
hold O love.”^7 Indeed, these “carols” of parting, like so many sea chanties,
seem intended to cheer the persona’s “passage” from this known world
into what Whitman sometimes called “the Invisible World.”^8
The best known of these 1868 poems, because of its daring simile
and its “calamus” provenance, is “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” An 1862–
1863 notebook contains a draft version of the poem in which “the Soul,
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 209