That “sprout” of grass is an effective metaphor for nature’s perpetual re-
newal and for human progress both within and beyond the bounds of
mortality. Nevertheless, the assurance that the dead “are alive and well
somewhere” is not altogether convincing. For as Ivan Marki remarks, in
his analysis of the ¤rst edition of Leaves of Grass, these “nebulous” lines,
these “shouted pronouncements,” indicate an evident strain in which “a
lapidary stridency replaces the early lines’ easy breathing” and show the
poet trying “to make up for the conviction which is not there and his
effort to extricate himself from the terror of death.”^13 In fact, the lines are
uncomfortably close to what has been called “the pseudoscienti¤c spirit
of assurance which the writers of consolation literature brought to the
subject of heaven.”^14 Among liberal religionists, says Corliss Lamont, the
image of heaven tended to blur into little more than a sentiment; this
attitude follows “the example of the eighteenth-century German philoso-
pher Immanuel Kant, who concentrated on proving immortality as a pos-
tulate of the moral law and wasted scarcely a word in describing it.” Cer-
tainly, Whitman shows the strain of announcing his faith in a future life
whose nature he cannot explain. The vague proclamations that “they [the
dead] are alive and well somewhere” and that “to die is different from
what any one supposed, and luckier,” identify neither the “they” who are
dead nor the “somewhere” in which they may exist. Nor do they clarify
the sort of good luck the dead will enjoy. But beneath their strenuous
rhetoric, the lines af¤rm a stubborn faith, reiterated throughout Leaves of
Grass, that death is an essential element of the universal continuum in
which the soul may be said to progress. By making an accommodation
with death, observes Robert K. Martin, the persona “realizes that he has
escaped the trap of mortality.”^15 For Whitman “the trap of mortality”
most likely implied the fear that there may be no possible existence be-
yond the grave. Whitman’s assertion of certainty concerning his own im-
mortality was for him a source of comfort, a stay against the terrors of the
unknown that sometimes darkened his thoughts about dying. But al-
though the fear was usually kept in check and barely noticeable, the trap
seemed to be forever there, yawning in the background.
The little lecture on death is resumed in the opening lines of the pres-
ent section 7, which repeats the claim that it is “lucky to die, and I know
it.” How does he know it? Seemingly through surges of the divine af®atus
that inspire him with a sense of his own in¤nitude. Having af¤rmed his
faith in a benign cosmic order, the persona then prepares to launch him-
40 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”