this sense, the persona “enters into” every person, object, or occurrence
that he beholds during his progress through the realm of life and death
both through his powers of human perception and through his powers of
cosmic perception.”^44 Everything he beholds when he is “afoot with my
vision” is compacted into the massive catalogue of section 33, which is
structured as a single virtuoso sentence, its clusters of adverbial clauses
and balanced participial phrases displaying countless snapshots of his ob-
servations, and coming to a close with a ¤nite subject and verb in the
sentence’s eightieth line. The catalogue exhibits the inspired persona
“speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,” speed-
ing from place to place, from era to era, from person to person, and ab-
sorbing (“becoming”) many identities whose essence he integrates into
his own transcendent and multifaceted self. Insistently intruding into this
panoramic overview of (mostly American) life, however, are the painful
images of death—“the life-car... drawn on a slip-noose”; “the half-
burned brig [which] is riding on unknown currents, / Where shells grow
on her slimy deck, and the dead are corrupting below”; the “burial-
coaches enter[ing] a cemetery”; and, in lines mirroring Whitman’s fasci-
nation with the hospitalized and the dying, the sympathetic (and possibly
autobiographical) ¤gure of an attendant standing
By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
By the cof¤ned corpse where all is still, examining with a candle.Envisioning himself negating time and “speeding” through the boundless
universe, oblivious to “material and immaterial” limits, he is able to pic-
ture himself “walking the hills of Judea” alongside Christ—an associa-
tion repeated several times in the poems. And once again he expresses his
absorption of vibrations from his fellow humans and from the divine
af®atus in terms of orality, describing himself as “a ®uid and swallowing
soul.”
Following the massive catalogue, section 33 develops a montage of
multiline vignettes in which death becomes increasingly palpable. One
vignette pictures the persona as a soldier entering “some vast battle¤eld
in which we are soon to be engaged” and beholding “some vast and ruined
city” that, like Petra, is a silent monument to death. Another vignette
conjures up a vision of the past—a mother is burnt as a witch while her
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 53