The last ninety lines of “Passage to India” (almost a third of its length)
are a love song to the persona’s soul, the spirit-lover who will accompany
him to their mystic India of pure thought and to a union with the Over-
soul. Once again, Whitman’s dualism teases us to distinguish between
the conscious “I” that is setting off for this India and the seemingly dis-
tinct “soul” that will accompany him. The problem of assuming that one’s
immortal state will preserve at least a measure of mortal consciousness
(a de¤ning characteristic of the Whitman persona’s postmortal self) was
pointed out by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who argued that “to prove
the survival of the mind or soul [after death] as something living and ac-
tive, we should need evidence that it is still developing, thinking, and will-
ing.” Divested of the body, the consciousness “may perish altogether.”^17
On the other hand, Whitman’s assumption that the soul undertakes its
passage to God accompanied by some manifestation of the conscious
self is consistent with some religious interpretations of an uninterrupted
unity of body and soul. John Williamson Nevin, a spokesman of the Ger-
man Reformed Church, propounded a radical version of this idea in 1846,
declaring that body and soul are “identical in their origin, bound together
by natural interpenetration subsequently at every point.” Body and soul
lead one life, he maintained. “When the resurrection body appears, it will
not be as a new frame abruptly created for the occasion, and brought to
the soul by outward addition and supplement. It will be found to hold in
strict organic continuity with the body, as it existed before death.”^18 And
in the closing years of Whitman’s life some members of the American
clergy launched a widespread defense of the doctrine of the immortality
of the body.^19 Assertions that body and soul will “interpenetrate” (in the
clergyman’s words) are more or less consistent with Whitman’s assump-
tion that some aspect of the persona’s conscious “self” will accompany the
“soul” on its journey to eternity.
Impatiently laughing and kissing his soul, and “singing our song of
God,”—“thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,” like a pair of
ardent lovers—the Whitman persona readies his departure to the realm
of “primal thought”: “To reason’s early paradise, / Back, back to wisdom’s
birth, to innocent intuitions, / Again with fair creation.” He does not
journey toward the God of Western theology but toward an abstract,
composite god—Whitman’s “Comrade perfect,” the source of all the har-
monies in the universe, “a moral, spiritual fountain” in which he hopes to
bathe perpetually. The journey toward the Spirit Beyond is also a quest
214 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”