So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease.... observing a spear of summer

grass.^6

By loa¤ng (and thus relaxing his physical and mental tensions) and by
inviting his soul to a spiritual communion, the persona attains the calm
that mystics claimed to be the precondition for entering into a visionary
state and uttering inspired words. He rejects the “perfumes” that signify
arti¤cial doctrines in favor of the rare¤ed air of the inspirational af®atus,
and he delights in the good health that makes him feel so vital a part of
the divine scheme. But by inviting his soul to merge with whatever part
of himself is not his soul, the persona introduces the concept of philo-
sophic (and personal) dualism that permeates much of Leaves of Grass.
“Clear and sweet is my soul,” he declares, “and clear and sweet is all that
is not my soul,” thus suggesting that the visible and the tangible serve as
analogues of the invisible and the unknown:

Lack one lacks both.... and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

The coexistence and interaction of the “unseen” and indestructible spirit-
self with the physical/material-self is basic to Whitman’s interpreta-
tion of personal immortality, particularly in the ¤rst three editions of
Leaves of Grass. “To elaborate is no avail,” he asserts, unwilling to have his
intuitions subjected to logical dissection or tests of religious correctness.
Hence his assertion (in section 3) that “learned and unlearned feel that it
is so.”
The persona illustrates the accessibility of spiritual illumination to
himself and to his fellows in section 5 by reconstructing the scene of
his purported mystic awakening—an epiphany similar to one that Whit-
man himself had reportedly undergone not long before he composed the
poem. His devoted physician and friend Richard Maurice Bucke claimed
(apparently drawing on Whitman’s own statement) that in June 1853 or
June 1854 the poet had experienced a revelation “that gave him the mental

“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 35