Another scenario pictures a “mashed ¤reman” with a crushed “breast-
bone” who lies beneath the rubble of a collapsed building. (Whitman’s
attraction to the daring and masculine ¤remen is recorded in various
autobiographical notations, and ¤remen are mentioned in several poems.)
In this remarkable vignette the persona himself “becomes” the agonized
¤reman, sharing his pain and his half-conscious thoughts as he lies prone
and helpless and appears to be watching his fellow ¤re¤ghters struggling
to extricate him and “tenderly lift me forth.” The dying ¤reman’s imag-
ined thoughts are touchingly ambiguous:
I lie in the night air in my redshirt.... the pervading hush is for
my sake,
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me.... the heads are
bared of their ¤re-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.These may be the thoughts of the half-conscious ¤reman anesthetized by
pain or those of the persona who has “absorbed” his conscious and half-
conscious thoughts. But viewed from another perspective, the injured
¤reman who is apparently at peace with himself as he looks into the
trans¤gured faces that encircle him like an aureole suggests that Whit-
man may be depicting an out-of-body experience of the ¤reman who may
be dying or may already be dead.^46 In the same way Whitman depicts the
disembodied specter of a dead person looking at his own corpse in “To
Think of Time.” As the persona delves deeper into the mysteries of life
and death, he “becomes” the clock of eternity; and his words become a
dial plate for all to read his vision of resurrection:
Distant and dead resuscitate,
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me.... I am
the clock itself.He who (in section 7) claims the power to “pass death with the dying and
birth with the new-washed babe” now peers into the farthest reaches of
eternity. And he concludes that the ¤reman’s life, like all lives, is not ex-
tinguishable by his fatal accident, because his essence will somehow sur-
vive mortality. As David Kuebrich reminds us, “in limning the violent
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 55