glory, which was commonly used as a symbol in mortuary portraiture, is
also an appropriate symbol for Whitman’s American drama of life and
death. The morning glory, says one authority,
was not a European symbol. But their growth cycle suggests a
particularly dramatic birth-to-death progression. First the green
vine sends out heart-shaped leaves and long clinging tendrils.
Slowly the petals of the bud grow, remaining tightly wrapped up
as buds around a spindle. Then, suddenly, the translucent petals
open to the morning sun, wilt as the sun’s rays become more in-
tense, and drop from the vine. Because their stems are short, and
because they bloom for a single half-day, the blossoms are gener-
ally not picked.^30Asserting that his “voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach” among
the wonders of the visible and invisible worlds, the person now proclaims
that “speech is the twin of my vision,” thus stressing his role as a visionary
who probes nature and the farthest reaches of the “invisible world,” and
is able to articulate their secrets. Nevertheless, since these matters can
only be learned at ¤rst hand, he challenges “whoever hears me” to set out
on his or her own road to self-realization. Having, in the poem’s ¤rst
major phase (sections 1 through 25) experienced a series of epiphanies,
having “absorbed” the secrets and the essences of hundreds of lives, and
having become vocal and prophetic, the persona now attains a spiritual
calm and is content to wait for another in®ux of the divine af®atus.
3
Sections 26 through 30 of “Song of Myself ” show the persona absorbing
his world through his exquisite senses of hearing and touch, what Roger
Asselineau calls his “hyperesthesia.”^31 His stimulated senses induce rev-
eries of sexuality and death. The ¤rst absorptive exercise of his senses
(section 26) occurs when he decides to do “nothing but listen” and to test
the limits of what Lawrence Kramer labels his “auditory imagination.”
The act of listening exhilarates his senses and excites him sexually, even-
tually producing a sort of postcoital depression and nightmarish death
fantasies in a “step-by-step dissociation of the poet’s identity.”^32 It is im-
portant to recognize, however, that these fantasies are self-induced—
48 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”