to attain the perfected Spirit Within. The godhead toward which the
persona is tending is a state of perpetual revelation, exhilaration, and
epiphany—a permanent spiritual high. His plea for enlightenment re-
sembles a Vedic prayer: “May that soul of mine, which mounts aloft in
my waking hours, as an ethereal spark, and which even in my slumber has
a like ascent, soaring to a great distance, as an emanation from the light
of lights, be united by profound meditation with the spirit supremely
blest, and supremely intelligent.”^20 In a burst of ecstasy—unfortunately
marred by its stilted “Biblical” language—the persona voices a premoni-
tion that his soul—“thou actual Me”—will ultimately become a Creator-
God, impervious to death:
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak,
if, out of myself,
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And ¤llest, swellest full the vastness of Space.“Reckoning ahead”—voyaging across the Unknown Sea by dead reckon-
ing—in these inspired moments, he envisions his soul reaching its destina-
tion and encountering a friendly, loving God: “the Elder Brother found, /
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.” Thus the persona who had
once been a fancier of calamus lads now fancies himself a member of the
Divine Pantheon where he has become God’s favorite Calamus Lad. Im-
patient to set sail for this India of his dreams, the persona cries out melo-
dramatically, “Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!”
The poem’s conclusion (section 9) features the persona’s imagined
sendoff to the “more than India” “where mariner has not yet dared to go,”
to the mythic realm that lies beyond the “aged ¤erce enigmas” of good
and evil that plague mankind, beyond fallible theorizing and fallible sci-
ence, a realm where the enlightened soul will ¤nally comprehend the
wisdom that lies behind the Vedas and behind the epiphanies of pure
inspiration. The “primal thought” for which he yearns is an “India” of
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 215