So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

the renowned American landscapist George Inness. The original paint-
ing depicts “large rocks, heavy cloud effect with sign of the cross in the
sky” and “small rocks right of center”; its warm earth and grass tones, its
luminosity and sidelights are typical of the artist.^88 On a low declivity
among the brooding mountains may be seen a tiny ¤gure in white, but it
is not clear which way it is facing. Whitman, who may never have seen
the original painting, submitted the requested poem within a month and
received an honorarium of twenty-¤ve dollars. However, the editors cagily
withheld publication of the poem, which they called “a mighty legacy from
the poet,” until the month following Whitman’s death. Then they pub-
lished two of its three original stanzas as “Death’s Valley,” and hastily
sandwiched the etching and the poem into a makeshift space, together
with a rather angelic etching of the poet, after a painting by J. W. Alex-
ander, which shows him crowned with ®eecy hair and a cloudlike beard
(and wearing granny glasses).^89 The poem’s ¤rst stanza, which the editors
chose not to print, concedes that “’tis ghastly to descend that [grim] val-
ley” where so many have entered and which is always ready “for entrance,
yours and mine,” and whose terrors have been exploited by preachers,
painters, poets, and philosophers. The two published stanzas, however, are
free of fatalistic implications. Speaking as one who has been a “hoverer of
late in this dark valley [of death],” Whitman asserts his “right to make a
symbol too.” And the symbol he chooses is, appropriately enough, that of
Walt Whitman himself—death’s preeminent witness and lover:

For I have seen many wounded soldiers die;

After dread suffering—have seen their lives pass off with smiles;

And I have watch’d the death hours of the old, and seen the

infant die,

The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors,

And then the poor, in meagerness and poverty,

And I myself for long, O Death, have breath’d my every breath

Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee

Professing to be unafraid of death’s terrors or its inscrutable mysteries—
“struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot”—the poet offers instead the
idealized vision of death that he had long nurtured. Nearly half a century
earlier, in a verse called “Death of a Nature Lover,” the ®edgling poet had
described the sort of solitary death he longed to experience. He desired,

242 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”