laration that “these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to
them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am.” And section
16, which follows, reaf¤rms his belief that his thoughts harmonize with
those of men and women in all eras, of “every hue and trade and rank, of
every caste and religion.” Yet amid all this diversity he still insists on his
essential uniqueness and his appointed place in the overall scheme of
things: “I am not stuck up and am in my place,” he declares. His words,
like the life-giving grass and “the common air that bathes the globe” with
its “breath of songs and behaviour,” are said to incorporate “the riddle
and the untying of the riddle.” He feels certain that what he calls “a liv-
ing principle”—the universal spiritual “law” that cannot be codi¤ed or
analyzed—is nevertheless most accessible to those, such as himself, who
are attuned to nature and to their own true instincts. He believes that
these unitary “laws of promotion and transformation” (as he calls the “liv-
ing principle” in “To Think of Time”) govern humanity’s perpetual pro-
gression through all phases of existence during one’s mortal life and be-
yond. In interpreting this principle of continuity as an “irrevocable” law
of nature, his “science friend” Anne Gilchrist explained that “everything
[is] the result and outcome of what went before; no gaps, no jumps; al-
ways a connecting principle which carries forward the great scheme of
things as a related whole, which subtly links past and present, like and
unlike. Nothing breaks with its past.”^19 Whitman excluded no one, no
matter how humble or corrupt, from the operation of the law, which em-
braced “the endless races of working people and farmers and seamen”
and the losers and unsung heroes as well as the seemingly fortunate. Ex-
istence is not “a sham, a sell,” he insisted. And indicating that his poetry
encompassed the entire range of existence, he declared, “I am the poet of
commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality.” Comparing
his heady pronouncements to the triumphal sound of a marching band of
a thousand players, he announces:
I play not a march for victors only.... I play great marches for
conquered and slain persons....
I sound triumphal drums for the dead.... I ®ing through my
embouchures the loudest and gayest music to them. [section 18]Changing the ¤gure of speech, he characterizes his inspired words as “the
meal equally set... the meat and drink of natural hunger” from which
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 43