ond aria the tree proclaims that with the passage of time “Nature’s long
and harmless throes” will install in “these virgin lands” a free people, en-
dowed with an “average spiritual manhood ” and a “womanhood divine”—a
people who are “hardy, sweet, gigantic,” and “tower proportionate to Nature.”
The tree’s cheerful acceptance of death in response to a force that is pre-
sumably both national and cosmic—“(age upon age working in death the
same as life)”—is an example of nationalistic mythmaking. Surely, Whit-
man knew that what he calls “nature’s harmless throes”—if not always red
in tooth and claw—could be far from “harmless”; an 1867 notation shows
how closely the poem re®ects his belief that racial selection is a compo-
nent of the self-ful¤lling evolutionary “laws.” Inexorably, he observes,
“comes Ethnological Science, cold, remorseless, not heeding at all the
vehement abstractions of equality and fraternity... and settling these
things by evolution, by natural selection by certain races notwithstanding
all the frantic pages of the sentimentalists helplessly disappearing by the
slow, sure, progress of laws, through suf¤cient periods of time.”^25 Thus the
tree’s demise illustrates the premise that “to build a grander future” hu-
manity must accept the workings of death as an instrument of selection
and of inevitable progress. Each successive social order in its turn, the
poem implies, must welcome death as an agency in the continuous pro-
cess of developing still nobler orders of beings in nobler societies.
“Prayer of Columbus” is a monodrama that (like “Song of the Redwood-
Tree”) illustrates its hero’s readiness for death. The Columbus ¤gure, fac-
ing rejection and death following a life of great achievements, remains
steadfast in his faith—an impressive surrogate for the paralyzed and
pain-wracked Whitman. The poem serves as an apologia and near-elegy
for the poet, who was still traumatized by the loss in 1873 of his beloved
mother and his sister-in-law, and fearful of losing his life to paralysis and
other ailments. Obliquely, it calls attention to his own disappointment in
failing to gain a mass audience. Prepared to die, Whitman-Columbus
makes a ¤nal curtain call that has an old-fashioned melodramatic ring.^26
He appears as a dying and “batter’d, wreck’d old man,” still intoxicated by
his vision of the “newer better worlds, their parturition,” which he has
discovered, and he remains eager to seek new worlds. If we accept Emer-
son’s dictum that the birth of a poet is the chief event of half a millen-
nium of human history—and Whitman toyed with the idea that he was
that poet—we can understand why Whitman donned the Columbus
218 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”