Clarke Wright wrote in 1863, “human nature!... stands out in the very
front of the great picture of creation, as the most beautiful and command-
ing object. As we can know nothing of God except through his manifes-
tations, we naturally regard the Human as the most perfect manifestation
of the Divine.”^70 And the concept that each man and woman must seek
the truth by following his or her own pathway—a fundamental assump-
tion in Leaves of Grass—was forcefully stated in the years immediately
preceding its publication by the radical sexual reformer Stephen Pearl
Andrews, a fellow Brooklynite, who asserted that “individuality is the
fundamental and indispensable principle of the universe.” Not only does
it furnish “the ‘best image of the In¤nite’ that the ¤nite mind is capable
of perceiving,” Andrews maintained, “but it is the foundation of all ra-
tional law and justice.”^71
The four concluding sections of the “Song of Myself” are, in effect, a
ritual enactment of the persona’s death, his physical dissolution, and his
implied resurrection. Behaving as though he were a cosmic force, he
greets death as an equal, in a fraternal tone and with a bittersweet em-
brace. By personifying death, he softens his anticipation of their impend-
ing confrontation. In the same way, Emily Dickinson softens the shock
of her imagined death by personifying death as a gentleman who has
come to squire her on a carriage ride to the grave. “As to you death, and
you bitter hug of mortality,” warns the Whitman persona, “it is idle to try
to alarm me.” Always fascinated by the drama of his own birthing—his
physical birth, his spiritual birth, and his poetic birth—Whitman depicts
the process of dying (in section 49) as though it were yet another birth-
ing. The persona calls death an “accoucheur,” or male midwife, and, in a
voyeuristic fashion, pictures himself propped up against the “sills of the
exquisite ®exible doors,” which are the metaphoric “outlet” of life and
death, while he watches death bring forth the dying as though he were
observing the parturition of liberated souls and marking “the outlet” and
“the relief and escape.” Harold Bloom observes that Whitman’s double-
barreled imagery renders death “indistinguishable from Orphic Eros, a
release that is ful¤llment,” since “neither we nor Whitman know precisely
whether he is talking about a womb or a tomb.”^72 But the ambiguity is
intentional. For Whitman there can be no birth without death and no
death without birth, and both are mediated by Eros. Love is an ever-
present solvent in his treatment of death as it is in his treatment of life.
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 69