Still he pursued the dream of setting sail, together with his soul, across
the sea of death, picturing himself as an “old ship” with sails unfurled
and ready to “take to the deepest, freest waters” or as the “eidòlon yacht
of me!” destined not on “our concluding voyage, / But outset and sure
entrance to the truest, best, maturest.”^60 In a gloomier moment the ag-
ing paralytic presented what he called a “mirror” image of himself as a
beached sailing ship—“an old dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled,
done... rusting, mouldering.” The image was probably inspired by an
etching of a beached, decaying sailing ship that hung in the home of
Thomas B. Harned, his benefactor and one of his literary executors.^61
But he could not resist playing little mind games with death, even as
his vitality ebbed and he felt “low down.” At times he tried to dispel his
doctors’ gloomy prognoses about his condition. In what may have been a
grim jest, the poet, who had long been preoccupied with his chronic in-
digestion and constipation, speculated in a letter to his last attending
physician, Dr. Daniel Longaker, that the energies required to sustain his
®agging digestive powers were steadily diminishing but that they were
somehow being transferred to his ever-active mind, the better to prepare
him, he conjectured, for a future life in some realm of pure thought:
My great corpus is like an old wooden leg. Possibly (even prob-
ably), that slow vital almost impalpable by-play of automatic
stimulus belonging to living ¤ber has, by gradual habit of years
and years in me and (especially of the last three years), got quite
diverted into mental play and vitality and attention, instead of at-
tending to normal play in stomachic and muscular and peristaltic
use. Does this account for the stomachic non-action, no stimulus?
Or what is there in this, if anything?^62Still, he cherished his lessening moments of joy and inspiration. “To the
Sun-Set Breeze,” which Dr. Bucke called a “most subtle, extraordinary
little poem,” captures those moments when, “alone, sick, weak-down,
melted-worn with sweat,” the vitalizing af®atus still brings him “occult
medicines.” The mystic doctor equated that evening breeze at the end of
the poet’s day with the occasional infusions of “cosmic consciousness,”
the divine in®ux that the poet still experienced. Bucke interpreted the
poem to mean that at age seventy-one, the closing year of Whitman’s life,
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 235