So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

After the supper and talk—after the day is done,

As friend from friends his ¤nal withdrawal prolonging,

Good-bye and Good-bye with emotional lips repeating,

(So hard for his hand to release those hands—no more will

they meet,

No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young,

A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more,)

Shunning, postponing severance—seeking to ward off the last

word ever so little,

E’en at the exit-door turning—charges super®uous calling back—

e’en as he descends the steps,

Something to eke out a minute additional—shadows of nightfall

deepening,

Farewells, messages lessening—dimmer the forthgoer’s visage

and form,

Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness—loth, O so loth to depart!

Garrulous to the very last.^48

Many short poems relate Whitman’s physical decline and his thoughts
about dying. When he was sixty-seven years old and had ¤ve more years
to live, he anticipated the snuf¤ng out of “the early candle-light of [his]
old age.”^49 “Twilight” depicts the steadily dimming light of his fading
years but praises the twilight glow as an abiding source of comfort:

The soft voluptuous opiate shades,

The sun just gone, the eager light dispell’d—(I too will soon be

gone, dispell’d,)

A haze—nirwana—rest and light—oblivion.^50

Those twilight colors are “voluptuous” (like the onomatopoeia of the
above lines) because they still afford the aging poet a measure of sensuous
delight; and they are “opiate” because they ease his pain and dull his
physical senses to prepare him for an easier transition to death. Old age,
remarked Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes at about the same time that Whit-
man wrote these lines, is “that narcotic which Nature administers” to ease
our passage to death.^51 In this example of the pathetic fallacy, the poem
depicts the fading sun as “eager” to display its light; it, too, wishes to
linger as long as possible. The reference to “nirwana” suggests the eman-

“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 231