his power to revivify the dying, contravening death by blowing the “grit”
of his life force into the most wretched of humans—the impotent, the
“drudge of the cotton¤elds or emptier of privies,” and into those who
have been given up for dead by their physicians. Utilizing a house-of-life
trope, he expresses his intention to rekindle the desire to live and to revive
the faith in one’s purposeful destiny even in the most hopeless of these
beings:
I dilate you with tremendous breath.... I buoy you up;
Every room in the house do I ¤ll with an armed force.... lovers
of me, baf®ers of graves,
Sleep! I and they keep guard all night;
Nor doubt nor decease shall dare lay ¤nger upon you,
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
And when you rise in the morning you will ¤nd that what I tell
you is so.Although the passage contains few vestiges of the homosexual imagery
that characterized its draft version, the promise of resurrection through
the persona’s inspirational breath therapy in the above lines is all the more
meaningful when it is compared to the imagery in Ezekiel 37, wherein the
prophet is set down by God in the Valley of the Dry Bones and com-
manded to prophesy to the dead: “Behold I will cause breath to enter into
you, and you shall live”; “I shall put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live.”
As a latter-day Ezekiel, a vates or poet-healer, whose gospel of faith re-
jects the merely “supernatural” as of “no account,” the persona undertakes
to wrestle with death itself. Whitman was apparently untroubled that
biblical accounts picture resurrection as a cataclysmic event that does not
jibe with his own version of personal imperishableness and steady cosmic
progression.
Whitman commented that although the various religions and churches
had become outdated and “do not satisfy the appetite of the soul,” they
must nevertheless be treated with “decent forbearance. Mean as they are
when we have ascended beyond them, and look back, they were doubtless
the roads for their times,—Let us not too quickly despise them; for they
have suf¤ced to bring us where we are.”^61 “All forms of religion,” he ob-
served, “are but mediums, temporary, yet necessary, ¤tted to the lower
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 63