The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer,
I ¤nd its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.In Romantic poetry the bird call serves as the voice of inspiration from a
higher power. After all, it is a “spotted hawk” that, at the end of “Song of
Myself ” appears to summon the persona to quit his earthly existence for
whatever unknown fate may await him. By stating that “I believe in those
winged purposes,” the persona implies that the bird’s call and its ®ight are
subject to the same universal laws that govern his own being. The ®ight
of the “wild gander,” in particular, parallels the persona’s spiritual journey
in this section of the poem. Indeed, many religions have equated the gan-
der’s ®ight with the trance-®ight of the shaman or mystic. During their
trance-state, the mythologist Joseph Campbell explains, Hindu yogis are
known as “wild ganders” or “supreme wild ganders,” and he observes that
in the image of traditional Hinduism, the wild gander is sym-
bolic of brahman-atman, the ultimate transcendent yet immanent
ground of all being, with which the yogi succeeds in identifying
his consciousness, thus passing from the sphere of waking con-
sciousness, where A is not A, passing even beyond dream, where
all things shine of their own light, to the nonconditioned, non-
dual state “between two thoughts, where the subject-object po-
larity is completely transcended and the distinction between life
and death dissolved.”^18In order to zoom his poetic lens over the broadest range of life and to
translate what the persona has seen and felt into poetic language, Whit-
man developed a unique version of the poetic catalogue. Just as New-
tonian science had undertaken to classify and label all the phenomena of
the known universe, so—as though he were the poetic heir of Linnaeus—
Whitman developed a unique poetic catalogue that could record every
aspect of human experience in tightly packed lines, evocative clauses, or
brief cinematic vignettes. Packed into the sixty-¤ve lines of section 15 of
“Song of Myself ”—in one continuous sentence—is a remarkably inclu-
sive sequence of verbal snapshots of more than four dozen persons or
groups of persons, all of whom have been so completely “absorbed” into
the persona’s heightened consciousness that the viewer and the object
almost become one. The extensive panorama ends with the persona’s dec-
42 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”