other different body” (The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Hawthorne and
Melville [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981], 2).
43.LG, 744– 748. Lynch, Undertaking, 18, attributes to the British prime minis-
ter William Gladstone the observation “that he could measure with mathematical
precision a people’s respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their
dead.”
- “Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning,” LG, 515.
45. Gay Wilson Allen calls attention to the fact that some of these verses were
leftover odds and ends from earlier periods (New Walt Whitman Handbook, 155–156). - None of the brief memorial poems that Whitman composed add to his luster.
Among them, “Outlines for a Tomb” (1870) commemorates the death of the New
England millionaire philanthropist George Peabody by poetically decking his tomb
with the vision of a fraternal, sororal America, somewhat in the manner of the deck-
ing of Lincoln’s tomb in “Lilacs.” The chauvinistic “From Dark Dakota’s Canyons”
(1876) eulogizes the deaths of General Custer and his men at the Battle of Little Big
Horn. Whereas the Indians are described in the poem as crafty, Custer “of the tawny
®owing hair” and “erect head” is said to exemplify “the old, old legend of our race, /
The loftiest life upheld by death”—the heroic spirit of the Civil War. For John Mul-
vany’s large painting as a possible source of “From Dark Dakota’s Canyons,” see Fol-
som, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 62–64. “The Dead Emperor” honors
Prussia’s Wilhelm I as “a good old man.” “Interpolations” (LG, 545) appeared a couple
of days after the death of General Sherman. And “Going Somewhere” (1887) is a
restrained brief verse for his “science friend” Anne Gilchrist, who had moved to
America for his sake and died in 1885.
47.LG, 574. “After the Supper and Talk” is the concluding poem in a cluster of
poems called “Sands at Seventy” and appended as an “annex” to Leaves of Grass.
48.LG, 536.
49.LG, 561.
50.LG, 530–532. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups (Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1894),
- For a similar thought, see Longfellow’s sonnet “Nature.”
52.LG, 532 n. - “You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me,” 532; LG, 513.
54.WWC, 1:464. Toward the end of his life, Whitman read several novels by
Cooper, expressing a preference for Cooper’s sea novels over the others: WWC, 9:125. - “My 71st Year,” LG, 541; Susan Hunter Walker, “I Knew Walt Whitman,” in
1980: Leaves of Grass at 125, ed. William White (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1980), 72;
Loving, Walt Whitman, 474. - Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 76– 77.
57.LG, 551–553. - “Queries to My Seventieth Year”; “As I Sit Writing Here,” LG, 509–510.
These reports of Whitman’s physical condition had a counterpart in the steady ®ow
of postal cards to Dr. Bucke, reporting on his aches and pains, his fading energy, his
paralysis and his digestion. - “L. of G.’s Purport,” LG, 555–556.
272 / Notes to Pages 228–234