his visionary powers had diminished, his inner voice had grown fainter,
and the “Brahmic splendor” had waned. Whitman, he declared, was bid-
ding good-bye not only to his friends and to his mortal self but to his
cosmic consciousness.^63 As if to con¤rm Bucke’s words, “Good-Bye My
Fancy,” a four-line title poem of the “Second Annex” to the “Deathbed
Edition” of Leaves of Grass (1891–1892), shows the poet bidding a loving
farewell to his “fancy,” the shaping spirit of his imagination. A note ap-
pended to the poem de¤nes his good-bye as “the salutation of another
beginning” but concedes that his “last words” are not “samples of the best”
of his utterances. In another brief lyric he deplores the state of his body,
now grown “sluggish, aged, cold... the light in the eye grown dim,” but
cheers himself with the thought that all “shall duly ®ame again,” for nei-
ther “life, nor force, nor any visible thing” ever disappears. And (in words
that anticipate William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All”) he af¤rms
that “To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns.”^64
One of Whitman’s last known conversations, with his New York host-
ess Alma Calder Johnston, shows him still focused on the subject of im-
mortality. According to Mrs. Johnston, who came away in tears from her
interview with the dying poet:
We had talked disconnectedly—with eloquent pauses—of immor-
tality, of the indestructibility of things physical and things spiri-
tual; of “things that cohere and go forward and are not dropped
by death”; of Death as dissociated with disease as Life is ever dis-
sociated with disease; of Death as feminine, a Strong Deliveress.
Yet we were not unmindful of the insight, the comprehension,
the experiences, that weakness and pain bring to the Soul, and
so accounted valuable a long and intimate acquaintance with
Death—a familiar contemplation giving new knowledge of life.^65The aging Whitman had attained the status of American guru with-
out a portfolio, and he was credited by some of his enthusiasts with pos-
sessing incomparable insights into death and immortality. And they were
not alone. Even Algernon Swinburne, who in 1877 had dismissed Whit-
man as immoral and lacking poetic talent, later concluded that “his views
on death are invariably noble” and that he “never speaks so well as when
he speaks of great matters—liberty, for instance, and death.”^66 Whitman’s
exchanges with the famed agnostic Robert Ingersoll, who, despite their
236 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”