Steeped amid honeyed morphine.... my windpipe is squeezed
in fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.In this reverie, the allure of beauty converges with the persona’s fantasies
of possible rape and of death by strangulation, for those “fakes of death”
are, literally, ropelike coils wound around his throat that can strangle him
and silence the voice that he equates with his selfhood and his immor-
tality. Lulled by the “honeyed morphine” of orchestral sound, he seems
almost to have swallowed the music (fellatio again?) in “gulps of farthest-
down horror.” Subsequently awakening from this music-induced night-
mare vision of death and sensing the calm that generally follows his in-
tense emotional arousals, his spirit becomes liberated and he is again
able to contemplate “the puzzle of puzzles, / And that we call Being.”
The word Being (in Jonathan Edwards’s usage, for example) can refer to
the ineffable name of God. The persona’s adventures in listening thus
appear to have carried him from the sounds of everyday life to a sexual-
emotional arousal, thence to a sense of experiencing death by strangula-
tion, and, ¤nally, to the state of calm during which he once again becomes
able to contemplate his place in the divine order. The experience of in-
tense beauty, as Keats knew, can induce an apprehension of death. Such
an experience, says Rainer Maria Rilke, is all the more terrible because
beauty can dangle us over the chasm of death: “Beauty is only / the ¤rst
touch of terror, we can still bear / and it awes us so much / because it so
cooly / disdains to destroy us.”^34
In sections 27–29 the persona tests the limits of his tactile imagination.
These sections of “Song of Myself ” are essentially the reworking of ex-
plicit draft materials in which Whitman explores the limits of pain and
pleasure, and the degree of physical and emotional intimacy that he may
be able to derive from homosexual (and possibly of masturbatory) activity.
Thus he notes that “there is something in the touch of an [sic] candid
clean person—what it is I do not know... but it ¤lls me with wonderful
and exquisite sensation.”^35 Like a hallucinogen or an emotional trauma,
the exploration of touch activates his libido, his imagination, and his
dream power, but it ultimately induces a loss of self-control. The tamer
version developed in “Song of Myself ” differs radically from the draft
original, portions of which are completely suppressed in the completed
50 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”