The imagery of birthing in these lines implies that the soul is reborn—or
rebirthed—through death. In what appears to be a deliberate pun, the
persona consigns his own “discharged” body (the corpse deprived of its
life-giving electrical “charge”?) to the “corpse-cleaners,” con¤dent that
his “real” spirit-body is being launched to “other spheres.” Repeating the
allegation that he has undergone many rebirths as his spirit was “ferried”
through its advancing stages, he acknowledges that each mortal life, in-
cluding his own, is a product of the “leavings of many deaths.”
Still, if the persona is to triumph over death, he must make a ¤nal
attempt to storm death’s fortress; to conquer death and attempt to divest
death of its mystery. An early British critic thus interprets what he calls
Whitman’s “sovereign dogma”:
Uncompromising realist that he is, he sees clearly enough that
death is one of Nature’s central facts,—a fact too which seems
to give the lie to his optimism, to bar its further progress, to
turn its triumphant advance into a disastrous retreat. If the joy
of his heart is to lead him to ¤nal victory, he must recognize that
Death is the key to Nature’s fortress, that as such it can neither
be masked nor out®anked, and that if he is not to retire from it in
confusion he must storm its terrible stronghold. And storm it he
does with all the passionate energy of his vehement nature. He is
not content to acquiesce in death, to speculate about it, to hope
the best from it. He sees the futility of half-measures. He must
“rush” the heights of death with the force and elan of unconquer-
able joy. He must ¤nd a deeper joy in death than in anything else
in Nature.^73In his ¤nal encounter with death, however, the persona does not precisely
“ ‘rush’ the heights of death”; rather, he makes a shamanlike descent into
the depths of death’s realm, into “the valley which was full of dry bones”
on which the Lord promised Ezekiel He would bestow the breath that
would revivify their ®esh, hope, and national identity. The persona under-
takes a ¤nal sortie into death’s dark valley to wrest death’s secret. But
death still withholds its secret from its would-be celebrant. Death re-
mains impenetrable, yielding no intelligible sign or sound. The sounds
in death’s realm are muf®ed, the persona ¤nds; the sights obscured by
darkening particulates. The ¤tful “sparkles” of the moon reveal a rotted
70 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”