‘[Burning] Driftwood’—both ecclesiastical, theoretical—and my ‘Good-
Bye My Fancy’—based, absorbed in, the natural. That that I’ve just said
is quite signi¤cant.” After a struggle to catch his breath, he added, “But
it will bear saying in full: it tells the whole story of ‘Leaves of Grass.’”^69
In fairness to Tennyson and Whittier, it should be said that their wistful
quatrains announcing their readiness to set out on the sea of death to
meet their Maker are hardly more “ecclesiastical, theoretical” than Whit-
man’s later verses. At the time of this ¤nal outburst, he had apparently
forgotten that he had once compared “Crossing the Bar,” “Burning Drift-
wood,” and his own “Now Finalè to the Shore” in a short essay titled “A
Death-Bouquet.” There he had reiterated his conviction that death is
“the greatest subject.” The essay likens death to “an invisible breeze after
a long and sultry day” that “sets in, at last, soothingly and refreshingly,
almost vitally” and sometimes “even appears to be a sort of ecstasy”—a
sentiment like the one he expressed in “To the Sun-Set Breeze.” And
reiterating his antic notion about his physical decline, he had added: “It
is a curious suggestion of immortality that the mental and emotional
powers remain to their clearest through all, while the senses of pain and
®esh-volition are blurred or even gone.”^70 How revealing that the dying
poet’s last words were an emotional defense of his place as the era’s pre-
mier poet of death, as opposed to the two elder poets whom he regarded
as his principal contenders (all three poets died in 1892).
During the closing months of his life Walt Whitman lay in a pitiful
and sordid state in the upstairs bedroom in his Mickle Street house. His
devoted physician Dr. Bucke described his visit to “the sick room (where
a divine man lies dying).” The room was cluttered and ¤lthy; the bed
(which had once belonged to Whitman’s mother) was rotten and foul-
smelling because of the poet’s incontinence and his being too set in his
ways to permit any changes in his sleeping arrangements. Whitman’s in-
transigence in matters concerning his living arrangements prevented the
making of “such changes as seemed absolutely necessary that he might be
cared for.”^71 Despite the physical ravages he had suffered (a collapsed
lung, near deafness, kidney failure, weight loss), the elderly bachelor de-
¤ed his doctors’ predictions of his imminent death. Almost a year before
he died he had complained of “a near deathliness which crept subtly, as
the day wore on, through all my bones.” In December 1891 he suffered a
severe physical crisis during which his doctors hourly expected his death.
The following February, a month before he died, and during a period of
238 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”