power, the moral elevation and the personal joyousness” that wrought
“the change... in his mind and heart” and that marked “the birth within
him of a new faculty.”^7 In the poem’s dramatic reconstruction of this mys-
tic experience, the persona’s godlike soul, depicted in the passage as a
sexually seductive and “loving bedfellow,”^8 spends the night with the per-
sona and, before departing, leaves him baskets ¤lled with the bread of
life—assurances of his self-worth and an awareness that little can be
gained by “ciphering” out the mysteries of life and death by logical or
mechanical means. The harmonious union between his body and his in-
dwelling spiritual essence is dramatized as a rapturous, but rather nebu-
lous, sexual coupling during which the conscious self appeals suggestively
to his spiritual seducer to “loose the stop from your throat” and to inspire
him with “the hum of your valved voice” by plunging “your tongue to my
barestript heart.” Above all, he appears to be asking his spirit-lover to be
granted the power of language that will enable him to become America’s
master poet. (Throughout the poems, in fact, the power of utterance is
equated with the af®atus and the life-force itself.) The mystic moment
ends with the persona’s conviction that he has experienced “the peace and
knowledge that pass all argument of the earth,” convinced that he is im-
mortal, and that a godlike element pervades him as it pervades every part
of creation. Whatever biographical or religious implications this cele-
brated passage may have, it certainly conveys the impression that a divine
presence has conferred its imprimatur upon this poetic work, thus sanc-
tioning Whitman to become an inspired interpreter of life and death.
Like all of the persona’s mystic experiences, this one is solitary. Possibly
looking back at this mystic incident of “interior consciousness” Whit-
man wrote in Democratic Vistas: “[O]nly in the perfect uncontamination
and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively
come forth. Only here, communion with the mysteries, the eternal prob-
lems, whence? whither? Alone, and identity, and the mood—and the soul
emerges, and all the statements, churches, sermons melt away like vapors.
Alone, and silent thought and awe, and aspiration—and then the interior
consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inspiration, in magic ink, beams out
its wondrous lines to the senses.”^9 Having momentarily shut out that
part of his dual selfhood that is rooted in the everyday world of joys and
frustrations, his spiritual “self ” rejects the “linguists”—the purveyors of
uninspired, and therefore false, language—and “the contenders”—the
advocates of the unpersuasive religious teleologies and of the secular doc-
36 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”