5
In sections 47 through 52 the persona takes his ceremonial leave of the
reader and prepares for his death. In these closing sections of the poem,
he resembles a Christlike master, leaving messages of faith and love be-
fore departing the mortal scene and eventually dissolving into eternity.
Nevertheless, his departure is not intended to sever his connection with
the living as he and his book venture into eternity, for he gives notice to
coming generations that he will forever be there in spirit (and in print)
to articulate their highest aspirations and destinies: “I am the tongue of
you,” he proclaims, asserting that his words will continue to “itch at your
ears till you understand them.” He feels inspired by the thought that his
book, and through his book his memory, will forever endure among the
living, for as the poet Joseph Brodsky reminds us, “it is precisely the ap-
petite for this posthumous dimension which sets one’s pen in motion.”^68
Once again the persona asserts his status as an interpreter of a world
that is ¤lled with divine emblems. Wherever he looks, he says, he ¤nds
“letters from God dropt in the street,” each one a clue to the divine order
and each one accessible to those with liberated minds. Apparently satis-
¤ed that he can discern the hand of God in the profusion of symbols that
¤ll his world, he appears willing to abstain from further speculation:
And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God
and about death.I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not
in the least,
Nor do I understand who can be more wonderful than myself.Like some of his pious contemporaries, Whitman did not entertain the
idea of a personal god. He did not (like George Herbert) yearn for a god
to batter his soul into submission or (like James Thomson) desire a god
who would “hound” him until he believed. To know God, he felt, we must
¤rst know ourselves. He accepted the Deist tenet that nature is “the font
of all that is good in the universe and that mankind should never be
downgraded in the interest of the supernatural.”^69 As the reformer Henry
68 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”