Whitman compares them to taking an opiate—by the persona who
wishes to test how close the senses can bring him to the brink of death
and self-destruction and a consequent sense of illumination and tran-
scendence.
Sounds reminiscent of death constantly intrude upon his senses—
the judge pronouncing death sentences; ominous ¤re alarms; the “low-
march” of a funeral procession. But it is the sound of music (to which
Whitman was passionately devoted) that produces the most intense re-
actions. The music of instruments, chorus, and opera produce “sweet
pangs through my belly and breast,” says the poem’s persona. In a re-
lated note Whitman expresses the wish to taste a sort of surrogate death
and then to be returned again to life—to be “convulsed” by orchestra
and chorus ¤lling him with passions, “unknown ardors and terrible exta-
sies... lulling me drowsily with honeyed morphine opium—writhing
about me the coils of collapsing death... tight’ning the fakes of death
about my throat, and awakening me again to know by that comparison,
the most positive wonder in the world, and that’s what we call life.” He
is enthralled by the voice of the brilliant tenor, an apparent reference to
Allesandro Bettini, “the orbic ®ex of whose mouth is pouring and ¤lling
me full.” (That last phrase may imply fellatio.) But the emotions under-
lying the tenor’s portrait run deeper than the poem suggests, illustrating
once again Whitman’s association of sexual passion with death. A note-
book entry praising Bettini’s singing declares that the tenor’s voice had
¤lled him with thoughts “of the spirit of life, and hope and peace” as
well as thoughts “of the red ¤re of passion, the cavernous vacancy of de-
spair, and the black pall of the grave.” The “trained soprano,” in the 1855
poem, “convulses me like the climax of my love-grip,” the sublimity of her
voice possibly bringing him to sexual release. (The celebrated contralto
Marietta Alboni “roused whirlwinds of feeling within me.”)^33 And or-
chestral music excites a range of emotions encompassing sublimity, terror
and death:
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus ®ies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of farthest down horror,
It sails me.... I dab with wet feet.... they are licked by
indolent waves,
I am exposed.... cut by bitter and poisoned hail,“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 49