he and humanity have evolved. In language reminiscent of his ¤nding
God’s emblematic handkerchief in section 6, he says,
I wonder where they got those tokens [of myself ],
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?This imagery of species evolution may owe something to Constantin Vol-
ney’s Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires, which depicts the
human soul as the culmination of a “physical metempsychosis, or the suc-
cessive movement of the elements, of bodies which perish not, but, hav-
ing composed one body, pass, when that is dissolved, into other mediums,
and form other combinations. The soul is but the vital principle, which
results from the properties of matter, and from the action of the elements
in those bodies, when they create a spontaneous movement.”^39
Sections 33 to 37 demonstrate the persona’s capacity to process the
crowding and contradictory impressions, both objective and subjective,
that impinge on his consciousness.^40 The deeper he probes into the hu-
man condition, the more he beholds the universality of agony and death.
His absorptive powers are most impressively displayed in section 33—the
greatest sustained poetic catalogue in our language. Although most of the
section seems to be based on the poet’s keen observation, some death-
drenched episodes of heroism in section 33 as well as all of sections 34
through 36, are based on semihistorical secondary sources, some verging
on pulp ¤ction.^41 As the persona identi¤es more closely with agonies and
with the attractive-repulsive allure of death, he grows increasingly de-
spondent, ultimately undergoing his most profound emotional crisis, but
a crisis from which he will again emerge calm, refreshed, and prophetic.
The opening line of section 33 reads: “Swift wind! Space! [later clari-
¤ed as “Time and Space!”] My Soul! Now I know it is true what I
guessed at,” that is, his assumption of the in¤nitude of space and time in
which he exists and in which he will continue to exist.^42 A belief in im-
mortality, as Frederick J. Hoffman explains, “serves to regulate the pace
of human time,” because it enables one to view each moment as both
¤nite and in¤nite, “and one may say that each physical phenomenon
touched by eternity gains a symbolic quality from the exposure to it.” A
sense of immortality, he declares, confers on each moment or object “a
compensatory grace of objective value” and “an eternity in depth.”^43 In
52 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”