man’s own faith in immortality, the proof of which is not “ascertainable
by any known means.” He paraphrased the poem thus: “If every effort to
fasten a de¤nite theory on some solid support on the other side of the
gulf [of death] fails, venture forth on the naked line of limitless desire, as
the spider escapes from an unwelcome position by ®inging out exceed-
ingly long and ¤ne thread and going forth upon it sustained by air.” In
the absence of veri¤able proof of a future life, the minister reasoned, there
always remains a universal will to believe in, and a craving for, a satisfying
existence beyond death.^11
Two milestones in Whitman’s poetry of death were the publication in
the Atlantic Monthly in 1869 of “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm” (later
“Proud Music of the Storm”) and the publication in 1871 of the 120-
page booklet Passage to India, which, together with Democratic Vistas, was
later bound into the ¤fth edition of Leaves of Grass. The lengthy “Proud
Music” is a splendid example of Whitman’s ability to capture the ca-
dences of nature and of human speech. In a dream that has the weight
of a manifesto, the poem’s persona beholds a vision of “the Almighty
leader [who] now for once has signal’d [to Whitman] with his wand,” and
he hears a grand mysterious diapason communicating directly to his
soul “the clew I sought so long.” Some higher power, he now feels, has
charged him to go forth and write “Poems bridging the way from Life to
Death.” The Passage to India booklet assembles death-oriented poems
from earlier editions and a number of memorable postwar poems into
what Whitman labeled “clusters.” Its title-page epigraph celebrates the
voyage of the persona’s soul “[t]hrough Nature, Time, and Space,” sing-
ing not of “Life alone” but of “Death—Many Deaths.” The brief lyric
“Now Finalè to the Shore” pictures the poet as a “Voyager” or “old Sailor”
loosening his moorings and launching forth from the known life across
the uncharted ocean of death. The volume’s closing poem “Joy, Ship-
mate, Joy!”—another lyric of the “self ” launching his boat ride to death
and beseeching his “soul” to accompany him as partners, lovers destined
to abide together through eternity—prompted another contemporary
clergyman to remark, “I know of nothing in all literature to match the
sweet, grand things that Whitman has written about death. This one
[poem] you can place beside Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar”^12 —the most
popular soul-launching lyric in all of English poetry. The imagery of set-
ting sail for death, which Whitman so frequently employs, is related to a
well-established tradition in American painting. The American land-
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 211