So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

deeply within themselves. To the despairing “disheartened atheistical”
skeptics he confesses that his knowledge comes from experience, for he
has suffered through just such “unspoken interrogatories” as they have: “I
know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and
unbelief,” he tells them. In a more thoughtful moment he concedes that
he knows only what his observations and his instincts have suggested to
him about what may follow death, which he terms the “yet untried and
afterward.” Nevertheless, he reaf¤rms his faith that death and the inexo-
rable operation of time will prove “suf¤cient” to provide a redemptive
democratic future for all mankind. His very doubts are cloaked in the
language of certainty:

The past is the push of you and me and all precisely the same,

And the night is for you and me and all,

And what is yet untried and afterward is for you and me and all.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,

But I know it is sure and alive and suf¤cient.

Each who passes is considered, and each who stops is considered,

and not a single one can it fail.^64

Thus he tries to reassure the masses that the ameliorating operation of
the vaguely de¤ned cosmic “law” (the infallible “it” of the above passage)
cannot fail the living, no matter how wretched or trivial their lives, nor
can it fail the dead, “nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest
graves in the earth.” Nor can it fail those yet unborn, or those living in
“the myriads of spheres,” he proclaims. (Whether those “spheres” are in-
habited by “myriads of myriads” of sentient dead, as the spiritualists might
maintain, remains subject to the persona’s—or the reader’s—interpretation.
In an era shaken by religious skepticism but replete with would-be mes-
siahs, Whitman favored his inner voice above all the religious arguments
or the “scienti¤c” proofs of “linguists and contenders.” In this version of
eternity, the dead seem to disappear into some vague fourth-dimensional
space-time. By implying in the most generalized terms that the afterlife
will be “suf¤cient” in its “richness and variety,” he leaves open the ques-
tion of whether the expression “what comes afterward” refers to a general

“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 65