thought that, like the stars themselves, his book will be “standing so well
the test of death and night.” The poem “Two Rivulets” once more illus-
trates the poet’s ideological dualism, as the persona and his soul ®ow to-
gether toward “the mystic Ocean” that encompasses “Death and Life, /
Object and Subject... The Real and Ideal.” Not only does the persona
feel the lure of death, but it appears that the “yearnful waves!” of the
Ocean of Death long to receive him and to kiss him with their watery lips.
“In Former Songs” also shows death ready to welcome him because his
“new Democratic chants” are saturated with the spirit and mystery of
death. In a mild musical pun, he remarks that his days, like his “chants,”
appear to be coming to a “close.” And in his “pealing ¤nal cry” he pro-
claims that his steadfast faith (like Martin Luther’s “fortress”) is his “cita-
del and tower.”
The 1881–1882 edition, chie®y important for establishing the ¤nal ar-
rangement of Leaves of Grass, contained only ¤fteen new lyrics, all of
them brief. “Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling” sets the tone for the verses
that Whitman would compose during the last decade of his life by wel-
coming his own death and voicing the hope that his mortal life, though
circumscribed by invalidism and pain, will continue as long as possible. In
the “October” of his life the persona beseeches the life-giving sun to per-
meate his poems and, in setting, to ease his way to death:
Nor only launch thy subtle dazzle and thy strength for
these [poems],
Prepare the later afternoons of me myself—prepare my
lengthening shadows,
Prepare my starry nights.Yet the benign tone of most of these late lyrics still masks a lingering
anxiety concerning death. Witness the frenzied emotion in the persona’s
imagined foray into the “dim, illimitable grounds” of death in “As at Thy
Portals Also Death” as Whitman summons up the haunting memory of
his beloved mother lying in her cof¤n. His ebbing days still produced
gnawing doubts about whether his poems would ultimately succeed. Pain-
fully dejected about what he felt to be the “last of ebb, and daylight wan-
ing” of his life and prepared to face the worst fate that could befall him—
the vanishing of Leaves of Grass from living memory—he shored up his
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 229