no one is excluded. Thus, his words become the Bread of Life, and he
becomes the godlike lover who yearns to instill his message of personal
in¤nitude and immortality into everyone.
The persona insists upon his own in¤nitude, rejecting religious dogma
and portraying himself as though he were one of Emerson’s Representa-
tive Men whose life demonstrates the eligibility of every human to a
meaningful mortal existence and to the immortality that may follow.
Having, like an archeologist, “pried through the strata and analyzed to a
hair,” he feels sure of his own centrality in the universe. Re®ecting Whit-
man’s interest in Egyptology during the 1850s, the lines that follow pic-
ture the persona as a sort of Champollion, intent on translating the richly
emblematic world as though it were a Rosetta Stone.^20
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually ®ow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.I know I am deathless,
I know that this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s
compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlicue cut with a burnt
stick at night.These lines con¤dently assert that his essential selfhood is inextinguish-
able and immeasurable by any known geometry. Spiritually imperishable,
he maintains that he will not “pass” into the dark night of death and
nothingness. (The word pass is used here and elsewhere just as the term
was used by spiritualists and mystics, to suggest the transcendence from
mortal life to a higher state of being.) As the self-appointed interpreter
of both the “demonstrable” world and the realm of “immortality,” the
persona appears eager to demonstrate that he can suffer no cessation and
that he will remain a primal force to be reckoned with. Small wonder,
then, that this ostensibly limitless being can fancy himself as a god who
is capable of mating—copulating as an equal and lover—with the “volup-
tuous coolbreathed earth” and with the “amorous” sea, which (as the
poem implies) are yearning to receive him. The “bright juice” of his sper-
matic discharge which “suffuse[s]” the very heavens is an audacious meta-
phor for his virile and transcendent selfhood and for his inspired utter-
ance in Leaves of Grass.^21
44 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”