Like Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Whitman knew the terrible toll that
is exacted from the artist who ventures too close to the terrors of death
and the blackness of the soul. Poe’s voyager to “the ultimate dim Thule”
of death returns disoriented and maddened. Melville’s Ishmael risks his
sanity by looking too long into the ¤re of his own dark thoughts. Haw-
thorne’s Ethan Brand destroys himself when he can no longer endure
his frightening introspections. Similarly, the Whitman persona becomes
overwhelmed by despair and emotionally drained through his compulsive
empathy with the suffering and the dying. “O Christ!” he cries out, “my
¤t is mastering me!” In this state of disoriented self-torment that his
medical contemporaries might have identi¤ed as brain fever, he “absorbs”
and suffers the miseries of the most wretched beings—young and old
prisoners, the mute and helpless beggar with outstretched hat (a tellingly
painful sight to the articulate persona who wears his hat as he pleases,
indoors or out), the handcuffed mutineer, and the cholera victim. Whit-
man himself was apparently haunted by his memories of the cholera epi-
demics that devastated New York in the 1840s and as late as 1854.^56 A
more abject human being can scarcely be imagined than the dying chol-
era victim with whom the persona identi¤es—typically an indigent, help-
less, lethally contagious immigrant, who, in the last stages of the disease,
is ashen-skinned, wrinkled, bleary-eyed, shrunken, and repulsively foul-
smelling:
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at
the last gasp,
My face is ash-colored, my sinews gnarl.... Away from me
people retreat.But his profound despair (like his other intense excitations) eventually
exhausts him and drains him of all emotion and eventually, as a conse-
quence, allows him to regain a state of calm and equanimity—the psychic
balance that was deemed a prerequisite for achieving the state of clair-
voyance. He is thus able, as he says, to “rise extatic through all,” to be-
come what Ronald Wallace calls a self-resurrected Christ ¤gure.^57 He
acknowledges that his zealous empathy for the miserable and the dying
has temporarily distorted his outlook and made him forget the indestruc-
tibility of his spirit and his centrality in the cosmic order. Having survived
60 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”