psychological defenses by recalling the fate of the legions of unful¤lled
“artists greatest of any, with cherish’d lost designs,” who had died in ob-
scurity. In this depressed mood, he uttered the tormented cry, “On to
oblivion then!”^44
Having ¤nalized the arrangement of Leaves of Grass, Whitman pub-
lished a supplemental volume of prose and poetry with the autumnal title
November Boughs. Many of its sixty-four lyrics and what Whitman la-
beled its “poemets” (for which the poet received small honoraria from
various periodicals) were added as an “Annex” to the 1888 edition as “Sands
at Seventy.” These verses reported his cheerful bearing as he faced physical
deterioration—solemn-sweet announcements of his readiness for death,
and cheerful expressions of farewell.^45 (Whitman also published a num-
ber of undistinguished elegies during these years, brief memorial lyrics,
many of them commemorating celebrated personages.)^46 In the prose
preface “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” (1888), Whitman wrote:
“In the free evening of my day I give you reader the foregoing garrulous
talk, thoughts, reminiscences,” and suggested that, alive or dead, he would
ever aspire to talk to the living reader. That sentiment is beautifully de-
veloped in the bittersweet vers de société masterpiece “After the Supper
and Talk.”^47 Against the onrush of the ultimate night the poem shows the
Whitman ¤gure striving to the very end to preserve his voice—the same
“garrulous talk” he had referred to in the introduction to “A Backward
Glance”—the “talk” that embodies his life force and his spiritual self-
hood. He feels that his words alone will perpetuate him in the mortal
sphere. Standing at the “exit-door” of life but loath to leave for the un-
known, he clings compulsively to the warmth of human hands, to the
music of human voices, and to the sound of his own voice. Although he
hopes that his poetic voice will endure into the future, he wishes to pro-
long his mortal vocal powers as long as he can. In order to achieve dra-
matic distance, and perhaps to cushion the shock of his impending death,
the poet employs a rhetorical device that is rarely found in his poems. He
refers to himself in the third person and pictures himself observing from
a distance the vanishing ¤gure of the mortal Whitman. His reluctance to
depart from the House of Life is expressed in a series of death-related
metaphors. And as a master of participials, Whitman constructs a verse
that (except for three lines contained within parentheses) forms an un-
completed statement, so that his departure, as he might have wished,
seems to be postponed inde¤nitely:
230 / “ Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”