any decisive evidence. But he believed that the sum of human knowledge
(which he conceived as a harmonious blending of personal experience,
“hard” science, certain pseudosciences, and broadly based religious ideas)
tended to buttress his belief in immortality. Above all, he trusted his own
perceptions and his intensely felt instincts as the best proofs concerning
the nature of life and death. Small wonder then that broad range of ex-
perience encompassed by “Song of Myself ” and its dynamic persona al-
ways includes death.
The innovative structure of “Song of Myself ” has opened the poem to
a broad range of interpretations.^4 Whitman probably sensed the shape
the poem would ultimately take, yet he seems to have ¤tted various dis-
parate sections (sections 6 and 34–36, for example) into its loose fabric.^5
Most readers know the poem from its ¤nal arrangement in the “Death-
bed” edition of Leaves of Grass, where it is divided into ¤fty-two num-
bered sections, perhaps to make it more accessible to readers who needed
to absorb one section at a time. However, in the ¤rst edition of Leaves of
Grass the poem is divided into unnumbered “stanzas” of a single sentence,
varying in length from one to sixty-nine lines (in present section 15).
These sentence-stanzas form the poem’s essential building blocks. To
emphasize their importance, the 1860 edition numbered them sequen-
tially, like verses in a Bible. Within the poem’s loose structure, words,
images, motifs, and ideas appear and reappear in nuanced variations. Al-
though only section 6 and sections 49 through 52 (as numbered in the
¤nal edition) are devoted exclusively to the theme of death, interspersed
throughout the poem are dozens of passages on dying, death, the possi-
bility of an afterlife, and the place of the persona in the timeless cosmos.
As “Song of Myself ” develops from beginning to end it becomes increas-
ingly focused on mortality. And in one of the most memorable farewells
in all of literature, it concludes with an imagined enactment of the per-
sona’s own death and his disintegration into earth, water, air, and spirit.
This ritual death is only the most impressive of several such farewells in
Leaves of Grass, all of whose successive editions, as well as the smaller
collections of poems that Whitman issued during his lifetime, end on a
note of death—sometimes the imagined death of the Whitman persona
himself.
From the poem’s outset the persona celebrates his existence as a demo-
cratic visionary whose hopeful gospel is intended to encourage the Ameri-
can masses to acknowledge the divinity latent in each of them.
34 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”