So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call,

Here, with vital voice,

Reporting yet, saluting yet the Of¤cer over all.^55

Whitman also depicted the romanticized death of the young Seminole
chieftain Osceola, betrayed by his American captors in 1838. The poem
pictures a digni¤ed and composed Osceola dying of a broken heart as he
dons his full regalia and war paint, smiles, and silently shakes hands
with his captors. Then he “¤x’d his look on wife and children—the last.”
The immediate source for this poem was probably a lithograph copy of
George Catlin’s highly inventive painting of the scene that was hung in
the poet’s room. Whitman claimed that the poem was based word for
word on what Catlin had related to him about the events that inspired
the painting.^56
However, Whitman could not remain impervious to the grimmer as-
pects of death. His seventieth birthday coincided with the disastrous
®ood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when an upstream dam burst and
some 2,200 persons were drowned in the ®ood waters that swamped this
working-class town. Deeply unnerved by the magnitude of the disaster,
Whitman composed “A Voice from Death,” which appeared on the front
page of the New York World one week after the tragic event The poem
mourns the victims “found and unfound” while praising America’s ca-
pacity to recover from such a cataclysm. The language with which Whit-
man acknowledges death as an awesome (masculine?) destroyer is oddly
reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God,” whose wrathful deity holds sinful humanity in His
hand over the precipice of destruction:

Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all,

incessant!

Thou! thou! the vital, universal giant force resistless,

sleepless, calm,

Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,

How ill to e’er forget thee!

The disaster jarred the composure of the aging poet, whose sights had
been focused on his peaceful departure from life; it made him realize that
he had temporarily “forgotten” death’s crueler aspect. And it reawakened

“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 233