For vainly through this world below
We seek affection. Nought but wo
Is without earthly journey wove,
And so the heart must look above
Or die in dull despair.“Fame’s Vanity” has echoes of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard” and the sentimental poems of young Bryant. “Time to
Come” (1843), with its echoes of “Monk” Lewis’s “the-worms-crawl-in-
the-worms-crawl-out” style of poetry is an uninspired declaration that
following death the soul will divest itself of the physical body. But in
questioning, “where will be my mind’s abiding place” following his death
(emphasis added), the young poet raises an issue that will continue to
trouble him, as it has troubled most immortalists, namely, Following
death, what is the relation between the human mind and the presumably
imperishable soul? Young Whitman seems untroubled that the mind is
generally assumed to be a function of the brain and the nervous system—
and therefore the mind’s functions cease when the body dies. Yet the ma-
ture poems that depict the afterlife of the Whitman persona—such as
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”—generally show him retaining the highest
degree of mental acuity and sensitivity. Lightly passing over such vexing
matters, however, “Fame’s Vanity” concludes by reassuring its readers of
their immortality, in which state, it hints, their “re-puri¤ed” souls may be
housed in astral bodies and clad in “robes of beauty.”^21 “A Sketch” (1842),
recently attributed to Whitman, also presents a scenario that appears in
a number of later poems. Standing at the seashore and looking into the
heavens for relief from his “darkened thoughts,” the youthful persona dis-
covers that nature has sent him a sign to bolster his faith in life everlast-
ing. He beholds a star and declares that “the rich radiance of its beams, /
Tells me of light beyond the tomb.”^22 But perhaps the most intriguing
image—one that haunted the poet for half a century—occurs in a ¤rst-
person version of the poem “My Departure,” written when the poet was
twenty years old. In this version of Waldeinsamkeit, or forest solitude, so
dear to the Romantics, the ®edgling poet prays that when his time comes
he may experience a solitary and peaceful release from life in a setting of
pristine nature. He expresses a wish to go alone into the woods, where all
is pure and serene, to lie down in an opening among the trees where there
is a view of a bay, and there at sunset to “leave this ®eeting world”—to
16 / Introduction