to the spiritual and moral worlds.”^42 Edwards’s “real” world seems not far
removed from Whitman’s world of eidolons, which the poem identi¤es
as the spiritual images or “phantoms” of an ideal self which each artist,
savant, or martyr strives to fashion during the course of a lifetime. The
urge to reach these “higher pinnacles,” according to the poem, may mani-
fest itself through science, democracy, exploration, or invention, and even
be apparent in the “giant trees,” rocks, buildings, the earth and the stars
that are “swelling, collapsing, ending” during countless eons and thus
“sweeping the present to the in¤nite future.” By situating our mortal
existence in the “ostent evanescent” Whitman implies that the known
world may be only a dark mirror image of the luminous “real” world of
eidolons, toward which each soul must strive:
Not this the world,
Not these the universes, they the universes,
Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,
Eidòlons, eidòlons.In its moments of “rapt, ecstatic” inspiration, the poem suggests, the soul
may “shape and shape” its “orbic tendencies” toward a higher existence, a
divine being. But at the present stage of human development, Whitman
explains, taking a modest bow, “the prophet and the bard” remain the
truest interpreters of “God and eidòlons.” And, once again, death is pre-
sented as the necessary intermediary between the known life and the life
of pure spirit. The persona feels certain that once he has doffed his car-
nal body in favor of his eidolon-body—“the body lurking there within
thy body”—he will gravitate toward “the real I myself, / An image—an
eidòlon.” And then he will ¤nd the eidolon-mates for whom he yearns.
Like Poe’s angel Israfel, he will eventually become the Eidolon-Whitman
whose holy songs will harmonize with the music of the Eidolon Spheres,
“rising at last and ®oating, / A round full-orb’d eidòlon.”
3
The 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman informs his readers, was
composed during a period of “grave illness, making this volume “almost
Death’s book.” “Preface 1876—Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets” con-
¤rms his change of poetic emphasis from celebrating the active life to
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 227