physical body that had characterized the earlier editions of Leaves of Grass
in favor of a mystic body—an eidolon body—that transcends mortality
and has af¤nities with the souls of the living and the dead:
Thy body permanent,
The body lurking there within thy body,
The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,
An image, an eidólon. [emphasis added]2
Whitman’s foreground provides some clues to his mature writings about
death. He seems to have been always sensitive where death is concerned.
He frequently recalled his intense emotional reaction when, as a Brook-
lyn schoolboy, he heard the explosion of the steamboat Fulton, which
jarred the city, and his fascination with the “strange and solemn mili-
tary funeral for the of¤cers and sailors killed by the explosion at the Navy
Yard... the impressive service and the dead march of the band, (mov-
ing me to tears) and the led horses and of¤cers’ trappings in the proces-
sion, and the black-draped ®ags, and the sailors and the salutes over the
grave, in the ancient cemetery.” (He also remembered another explosion
in Rockaway, Long Island, some years later.) As an impressionable ten-
year-old he served as an errand boy to a Brooklyn physician who had
participated in Admiral Decatur’s North African campaign in 1804 and
who related tales of battle carnage—tales that apparently lingered in the
memory of the poet, whose gory imagery of “an old-time sea-¤ght” in
“Song of Myself ” is unexcelled in its sensuous evocation of violent death.
And he recalled his fascination with graves and burial sites during his
boyhood rambles through Brooklyn and its rural surroundings—a fasci-
nation that remained throughout his life as these modest rustic cemeter-
ies gave way to large, anonymous cemeteries accessible to rich and poor
city dwellers.^16 According to William Roscoe Thayer, those who knew
Whitman “in early and middle life” found him to be a “preternaturally
emotional” man who gave free rein to his feelings. Whether through in-
tellectual curiosity or an inborn empathy with suffering, Whitman seems
always to have been susceptible to the allure of suffering and death. His
family friend Helen Price recalled a conversation about death in which
Introduction / 13