self on a vast imaginary journey, during which he will test his extraordi-
nary visionary and sympathetic powers and will enter into the conscious-
ness of hundreds of his contemporaries from all walks of life (sections 8
through 15). As though he were airborne and impervious to the workings
of time and causality, he views the world below him. And like a mesmer-
ist or a visionary, he appears able to penetrate the realms of life and death.
“I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe,” he
boasts. And further illustrating Whitman’s “psychic disposition which in-
clined him to mystical experiences—excursions from what seemed to be
the margins of himself,”^16 the persona asserts that his true dimensions are
not circumscribed by the six-foot span “contained between my hat and
boots.” For such reckoning would not encompass his immeasurable spiri-
tual divinity, which will survive his physical demise and become inte-
grated into his immortal self. (Whitman could not imagine separating
some of his mortal attributes from the identity he hoped to retain when
he was no longer mortal.)
In these sections of “Song of Myself ” the persona prophesies a spiritual
democracy whose advent depends, in no small part, on the workings of
death. “I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
fathomless as myself,” he asserts. “They do not know how immortal, but
I know.” His proclamation that the mass of humanity are eligible for
immortality casts him in the role of an egalitarian, but his assumption
that he possesses insights into their immortality of which they are still
incapable positions him above the masses. In the course of the persona’s
panoramic mental journey across America, he claims to see “through the
broadcloth and gingham whether or no” and to penetrate the minds and
hearts of his fellows in all walks and conditions of life. He appears to
receive a “resonance” from every person he sees, as though his mind were
a mental sonar that responded to every vibration emanating from man
and woman. He observes and “identi¤es with” infants, young lovers,
farmers, craftsmen, boaters, trappers, slaves, a sex-starved woman whose
yearnings for intimacy become his own, and a suicide who “sprawls on
the bloody ®oor of the bedroom,” but who, in a draft version of this pas-
sage, has hanged himself.^17 In section 14 he identi¤es with horses, moose,
and, signi¤cantly, with wild geese:
The wild gander leads his ®ock through the cool night,
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 41