to express a lingering fear that his poetic vision and his labors may not
have helped to inaugurate the new worlds he has foreseen and that his
death may prove meaningless after all. In tormented lines that re®ect the
poet’s dif¤culties in sustaining his image as an optimistic bard and seer,
the Columbus persona questions the fogginess of his visions:
Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present,
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.But this momentary crisis of faith is unexpectedly resolved, in much the
same fashion that similar crises are resolved in some of the earlier po-
ems, by a sort of deus ex machina—a sudden epiphany during which the
persona is miraculously rescued from his despair by nature’s visual and
aural auguries of hope. His eyes and ears are seemingly unsealed by some
higher power, and he senses that his claim to prophetic powers has been
validated and his fame assured:
And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.That “hand divine” appears to have unsealed his eyes and strengthened
his visions of the future; “shadowy vast shapes” appear as if to escort
him through the blessed gates of death. And he seems to hear welcom-
ing “anthems” from nature or the Oversoul, the signi¤cance of which
is glossed in a passage in an 1860 poem in which the inspired persona
discovers that the inspirational “music always round me, unceasing, un-
beginning, yet long untaught I did not hear,” has suddenly revealed its
“exquisite meanings” to him.^34 Whitman’s Columbus appears prepared to
die in a state of grace, prepared to meet his Maker. During his two re-
maining decades, Whitman seemed always prepared for his death, ready
222 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”