regard for ritual, he followed Irving’s lead in portraying a Columbus who
was prepared to meet death with a clear conscience because he was on the
best of terms with his Maker. Whitman’s Columbus mirrors Whitman’s
self-image—a “batter’d, wreck’d old man” who is “venting a heavy heart,”
uncertain that his cherished enterprises have succeeded. The poem’s Co-
lumbus ¤gure faces death with the patience of a saint as he utters the
passionately cadenced prayer that forms the heart of the poem and that
can be read as Whitman’s own testament. The Columbus persona de-
clares that he has never lost “faith nor ecstasy” in his God, that he has
always responded to “the potent, felt, interior command, stronger than
words, / A message from the Heavens, whispering to me even in sleep.”
In the testimony of Whitman/Columbus that he has been spurred on by
his faith to discover new worlds, we can almost hear Whitman himself
testify that he, too, has been driven by a higher force to explore new
worlds of thought and language. As he explained in 1872, he felt an avow-
edly “religious” motivation in writing Leaves of Grass:
I ful¤lled in that an imperious conviction, and the commands of
my nature as total and irresistible as those which make the sea
®ow or the globe revolve.... But what is life but an experiment?
and mortality but an exercise? with references to results beyond.
And so shall my poems be. If incomplete here, and super®uous
there, n ’imp or te—the earnest trial and persistent exploration
shall at least be mine, and other success failing, shall be success
enough.... I ventured from the beginning, my own way, taking
chances—and would keep on venturing.^32However, the Columbus persona’s faith as he faces death is momen-
tarily shaken by the fear that his ventures may have been failures. Sensing
his “terminus near,” his “brain bewilder’d,” his “timbers part[ing],” he
voices the hope that “haply” (by chance or accident) he will have helped
to reform “the brutish measureless undergrowth” of humanity. That state-
ment hardly coincides with the conduct of the historic Columbus toward
the indigenous Caribbean peoples, whom he regarded as subhuman and
whom he ordered to be enslaved and decimated. But it accords with
Whitman’s assessment, in Democratic Vistas, of the moral disease pervad-
ing the American body politic and his hope that his writings will point
the way to eventual reforms.^33 Still, the poet uses the voice of “Columbus”
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 221