mass-range of perception of the race—part of the infant school—and
that the developed soul passes through one or all of them, to the clear
homogeneous atmosphere above them.”^62 The persona illustrates this
idea in section 41 by gambling his own divinity against that of all the gods
who were ever worshiped and (as the precursor of a new religion) out-
bidding them all. And once more combining sexuality with spirituality,
he shifts his image to picture himself as a benevolent and priapic god of
his own devising—a god whose genitalia (“my life-lumps”) are discharg-
ing “the stuff of more arrogant republics”:
By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator!
Putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of
the shadows.Throughout “Song of Myself,” it should be observed, the partners in the
persona’s heroic copulations are neither identi¤able women nor the ide-
alized women of traditional poetry; rather, they are vast abstractions such
as womankind, the earth, the sea, the heavens, and “the ambushed womb
of the shadows,” each of whom he suffuses with his “libidinous” “prongs
of bright juice.” Does that shadowy “ambushed womb” belong to the ab-
stract biological mother of all future generations whom the awesome per-
sona proposes to fertilize (or at least to inspire) with his own seminal
words? Whitman’s language is troublesome. By describing the womb as
ambushed he may have intended some sort of analogy with the word em-
bouchure, one of whose meanings is the out®ow of a river into a delta, and
hence a ¤tting symbol of the birth canal or, more abstractly, a passageway
from life to death or from death to life.^63
Thereafter, as a self-anointed prophet and healer, the persona preaches
a bracing sermon to the ordinary “folks”—his doubting and despairing
fellow citizens, including the “plentiful little manikins” who are the cogs
in the machinery of urban capitalism, and to all those “never to the feast
going.” He reassures them of his instinctual certainty that they are ulti-
mately as worthy and immortal as he is. His is the greatest of faiths, he
tells them—one that encompasses (and, by implication, surpasses) all
“worship ancient and modern.” They need no “saints and sages” to con-
¤rm the truth of his gospel, he tells them; they need only to lead coura-
geous lives, to behold the wondrous world they inhabit, and to look
64 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”