dreaming.”^28 Following the publication of “Prayer of Columbus,” Anne
Gilchrist asserted that the person portrayed in this “sacred poem” who
had sacri¤ced his health for a noble cause was indeed “our Columbus,
Walt Whitman.” Whitman’s friend Ellen O’Connor claimed that the
poet had “unconsciously put a sort of auto-biographical dash into ‘Prayer
of Columbus.’ ” These friends, like many readers in the last quarter of the
century, interpreted the poem as the inspired utterance of a great mystic.
Whitman’s “Columbus” has been compared to Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a
poem Whitman said “shows the grand master” and which, according to
Dr. Bucke, the poet sometimes recited aloud.^29 In both poems an aging
speaker gazes at the ocean as he proclaims his abiding faith and his eager-
ness to serve in his declining days. Tennyson’s elderly Ulysses, “made
weak by time and fate, but strong in will,” still burns “to strive, to seek,
to ¤nd, and not to yield.” But as the product of a poet in his twenties,
Tennyson’s hero seems more imbued with the Victorian spirit of let-us-
then-be-up-and-doing than with what Bishop Jeremy Taylor two centu-
ries earlier had called Holy Dying, which is the chief concern of Whit-
man’s Columbus ¤gure. In Whitman’s America, a patient readiness for
death was revered as a virtue. Thus the George Washington depicted in
Parson Weems’s mythobiography was as much esteemed by two genera-
tions of readers “for his deathbed patience and submission as for his
inability to tell a lie.”^30 A patient readiness for death also characterizes
the hero of Washington Irving’s Life and Voyage of Christopher Columbus
(1828), from which Whitman drew some of the poem’s details. Irving had
pictured a dying Columbus, still pleading with the Spanish monarchs to
restore him to his position of honor. (Coincidentally, some of Whitman’s
friends sought in vain to obtain a federal pension to reward the disabled
poet for his service in the military hospitals.) Irving’s idealized Colum-
bus, his frame shattered, his mind “chilled” by the cold ingratitude of his
sovereigns, who have not even reimbursed his monetary outlays, prepares
to die: “Having thus scrupulously attended to all the claims of affection,
loyalty, and justice upon earth, he turned his thoughts to heaven, confess-
ing himself, partaking of the holy sacrament, and complying with the
ceremonies of a devout Catholic... he expired with great resignation, on
the day of Ascension, the 20th of May, 1506, being about seventy years of
age. His last words were, ‘In manus tuas Domine, commendo spirito meum.’
‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’ ”^31
Although Whitman rarely addressed a personal God and had scant
220 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”