him to the realization that “wrapt in these little potencies of progress,
politics, culture, wealth, invention” were the “silent ever-swaying power”
and “the mighty elemental throes” of death, “in which and upon which
we ®oat, and every one of us is buoy’d.” In sharp contrast to his many
poems of benign death, “A Voice from Death” exhibits a rekindled respect
for death as a cruel destroyer. In the poem, the personi¤ed voice of Death
calls attention to a paradox: whether it be manifested as a gentle midwife
or as a ruthless destroyer, death is an aspect of the universal law that
governs the world. The voice of sudden death asserts that although it may
arrive unexpectedly, “in horror and pang,” it, too, is “a minister of the
Deity.”^57 The poem reiterates Whitman’s belief that even such dire events
as the Johnstown ®ood must eventually become integrated into the cos-
mic process of spiritual advancement. In imagery that recalls the hopeful
resolution of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” “A Voice from Death”
predicts that from the very ooze of the ®ood waters “blossoms and birth
[will] emerge.”
4
By the year 1888 Whitman was sending rivulets of verses, virtual health
bulletins in which he reported his ailments and his abiding faith, to the
newspapers. The verses related his struggles against “weakness, blind-
ness, more paralysis,” irritability, or death’s onslaught that would “cut me
short for good”; and they expressed the fear that his “daily songs” could
become tainted by his “ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipa-
tion, whimpering, ennui.”^58 “A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine” describes “The
body wreck’d, old, poor, and paralyzed—the strange inertia falling pall-
like round me, / The burning ¤res down in my sluggish blood not yet
extinct, / The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.” There
were, in fact, many moments when the poet seemed to his doctors about
to breathe his last, and at times death loomed up before him like an omi-
nous specter:
I sing of life, yet mind me well of death,
To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has
for years—
Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.^59234 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”