horri¤ed children look on. And in an odd montage of violence, sexual
excitement, and the terror of death, the persona “becomes,” in rapid suc-
cession, an aggressive lover enacting a rape fantasy, a drowned bride-
groom (death by water seems to have haunted the poet), and the grieving
bride herself:
I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
And tighten her all night to my thighs and lips....
My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drowned.So closely does he identify with the grieving woman that when she be-
holds the body of her drowned mate her agonized “screech” seems to
issue from his throat. Throughout section 33 the persona identi¤es with
those who endure anguish and death: “All these I feel or am,” he pro-
claims. In another vignette he “becomes” the “hounded slave,” whipped
insensate and murdered by the slave master’s “buckshot and bullets.” As
these passages demonstrate, Whitman is not only the poet of life and
death, but he is the poet of agonies. “Agonies are one of my changes of
garments,” the persona testi¤es, as though to indicate that he is the very
personi¤cation of agony. “I myself become the person,” he asserts. His
declaration is all the more poignant when one considers that agony can
be de¤ned as the ¤nal painful struggle that precedes death. A ten-line
passage converts a New York Tribune report of the tragedy that befell the
steamship San Francisco in 1854, with a loss of 150 lives, into graphic po-
etry. Although the episode serves as a tribute to the ship’s chief of¤cer,
who succeeded in saving the ship and the lives of many passengers and
whose heroism Whitman recorded in one of his notebooks, the poet
transforms the vessel into a Coleridgean death ship, “Death chasing it up
and down the storm.” He paints a horrifying scene of the gaunt and dying
women and children.^45 Witness the “oral” imagery of the vignette’s con-
cluding couplet, in which death is once again associated with tasting and
swallowing. The persona ingests death and agony as though they were
delicacies and he were a living Christ savoring the woes of the world:
All this I swallow and it tastes good.... I like it well and it
becomes mine,
I am the man... I suffered... I was there.54 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”