nity. Leaves of Grass, too, is such a springboard from which emanations
from the poet’s soul will forever be launched into the hearts of men and
women to convey the “steady and central” truth of his gospel.
Finally, as though he were emerging from the trance that has trans-
ported him to the deepest realm of death and thence into the empyrean
heavens for a glimpse of the universe, the persona awakens, “wrenched
and sweaty,” from his dream state. Still thwarted because he cannot ar-
ticulate what he feels to be the ¤nal truth about death and its role in the
cycle of existence, he utters a series of staccato clauses whose breathless
tension testi¤es to his frustration at the inadequacy of language:
There is that in me... I do not know what it is... but I know
it is in me....I do not know it.... it is without name.... it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary or symbol.Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakens me.Perhaps I might tell more.... Outlines! I plead for my brothers
and sisters.Do you not see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death.... it is form and union and place... it
is eternal life... it is happiness.And as though he were making a last desperate effort to convince his
readers by sheer oratorical ¤at that eternity is their best bet, that last line
in the 1860 edition virtually shouts at the reader: “it is happiness.”
In an 1855 anonymous review, in which he refers to himself in the third
person, Whitman reassures readers that happiness, like “perfection” is an
attainable goal for those who avoid “the preaching and teaching of others,
and mind only these words of mine.”^75 Immanuel Kant de¤ned happiness
as “the state of a rational being existing in the world who experiences
through the whole of his life whatever he desires or wills.” Kant judged
the immortality of the soul to be “a postulate of pure practical reason.”
Like Whitman, he linked happiness, immortality, and moral law (key
72 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”