power,” and the poem “As They Draw to a Close” (1872) de¤nes “the
joyous electric all” as encompassing nature and God, life and death.
Rejecting the “Babel” of doctrines, the third section of “Song of the
Universal,” the poem hints that inspired seers and poets, who are called
“the blest eyes, the happy hearts,” may follow “the guiding thread so ¤ne, /
Along the mighty labyrinth,” and so catch a glimpse of the ideal in “one
ray of perfect light, / One ®ash of heaven’s glory.” Or, with equal luck,
they may chance to hear “from some far shore the ¤nal chorus sounding.”
True poets, the lines imply, may even hope to receive mystic communica-
tions from beyond the grave. The ¤nal section (some twenty-four of the
poem’s sixty-¤ve lines) designates America as the destined site of the
“scheme’s culmination”—a place where, through “dei¤c faiths and ampli-
tudes” and through the working of “immortality” and “love,” all men and
women may ripen into idealized “spiritual images” (or what the poet later
calls “eidolons”) of themselves. And, as be¤ts an ode intended to be read
before an audience of Universalist clergy and theology students, the pen-
ultimate stanza is a prayer for the triumph of goodness within the Divine
Plan and a call to sustain the faith on which the poem is predicated:
Give me O God to sing that thought,
Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space,
Health, peace, salvation universal.Without alluding to any speci¤c dogma, the “[b]elief in plan of Thee”
once more assumes the existence of a divinely ordered universe. The dec-
laration that without faith in such a plan life itself could prove to be only
“a dream” exempli¤es the depth of Whitman’s philosophic idealism and
could, without dif¤culty, be deconstructed to imply that the ful¤llment of
God’s plan ultimately hinges on the strength of one’s belief in it.
Whitman’s prewar poems had derived much of their tension from the
poet’s efforts to balance material and spiritual values, but his later poems
edged closer to Berkeleyan idealism by scanting the material element in
favor of the spiritual. The older Whitman even hints that if the ideal
world of which he has dreamt is not a reality, then the reality he perceives
in the everyday world may be only a dream. “As his conception of the soul
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 225