scape painter Thomas Cole had “made the boat on the water a recognized
symbol for the passage from life to death in his second landscape cycle,
The Voyage of Life (1840).” And Whitman long remembered a remark
made by an of¤cer during the war years: “He went out with the tide and
the sun’s set.”^13
The most ambitious of the ocean-going “carols” in the Passage to India
booklet is its loosely structured title poem.^14 Here the persona prepares to
launch his spirit journey from America’s Paci¤c Coast—itself a mythic
place that the poet never visited—to ¤nd the mythic “India” of the soul.
When Whitman was younger and physically agile, his persona deter-
mined to “tramp a perpetual journey” toward the limitless beyond, but
once the poet became less physically active, his persona favored the less
strenuous imagery of sailing. “Passage to India” initiates the soul’s voyage
back to “primal thought”—the sacred source of wisdom and spirituality.
The poet praises the explorations of the past and the modern triumphs
of transportation technology that have succeeded in girdling the world—
the trans-Atlantic cable, the transcontinental railroad, and the telegraph.
These material achievements lead him to the conclusion that technologi-
cal advances are indicators of human advancement toward a nobler spiri-
tuality, working “in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul.” According to
this reasoning, mechanical energy becomes an “analogue for divine spirit”
and material and scienti¤c progress becomes an analog for spiritual ad-
vancement.^15 Although “Passage to India” is, in part, a critique of Ameri-
can society, it essentially celebrates the persona’s quest for the “India” of
the spirit and for his hoped-for transcendence, through time and death,
to a state of ultimate wisdom. Whitman commented in 1876 that “all
lives and poems” should refer to “the justi¤ed and noble termination
of our identity, this grade of it, and the outlet-preparation for another
grade.”^16 “Passage to India” commemorates the persona’s imagined “outlet-
preparation” for “another grade” of existence as he readies to seek the
mysterious God who will be his equal, his companion, his lover, and his
ultimate Self. Thus the poem that begins by praising mechanical progress
becomes a paean to spiritual progress and the ennobling state of death.
In a series of rhythmic anaphoras—lines beginning with the repeated
phrase “I see”—the persona scans the American continent, newly crossed
by railroads, and envisions the coalescence of America’s material culture
with the spiritual culture of the mythic East. He regards the many daring
explorers and bards of the past who have mapped the world’s vast terra
212 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”