tener up there” (perhaps one born generations later) to accompany him
or to surpass him. Before visibly departing he waits “on the door-slab” of
the house of life to be joined by anyone who “will soonest be through
with his supper”—that is, the Bread of Life, the gospel of freedom and
in¤nitude. Unlike Emerson, who sought companions whose minds were
attuned to his own rare¤ed thoughts,^78 the democratic Whitman persona
seems content to “concentrate toward them that are nigh... to walk with
me.” He invites the “listener” to “look on my face while I snuff the sidle
of evening”; metaphorically, at least, he is inhaling the welcome aroma of
death and observing the “last scud of day,” that is, the twilight of his
impending departure that “coaxes” him toward “the vapor and the dusk”
of physical disintegration and toward the triumph of the spirit. As the
departing persona slowly fades from view, he invites the reader to exam-
ine his cloud-borne face as the “plenum of proof ” of his triumphant self-
hood and as the symbol of eternal hope. (Alternatively, the reader could
turn back to Whitman’s frontispiece portrait in the 1855 edition and—
applying the techniques of physiognomy and phrenology—make his or
her own diagnosis of its features.) The ostensibly dying Whitman per-
sona seems willing to exchange his mortal state for another condition,
fully determined to remain an active participant in the cosmic mystery,
able to in®uence the lives of the generations that will survive his passing.
He leaves, not with a whimper but a decided bang:
I too am not a bit tamed.... I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.The “barbaric yawp” that he sounds de¤antly, like the “ya-honk” of the
wild gander in section 14, is a primordial utterance from the heart of
nature, whence his inspiration is derived. Summoned by a hawk—a sha-
manistic messenger—to slough off his mortality, the persona loiters af-
fectionately in the mortal sphere, ready to go but reluctant to loosen his
hold on his earthly life or to relinquish the “gab” that is his ultimate con-
nection with humanity. But ultimately he surrenders to physical dissolu-
tion and transmutation into the elemental air and soil and grass so that
his diffusing spirit can pervade the whole world. “I depart as air [af®a-
tus?],” cries the persona of the thirty-six-year-old poet, as though he were
enjoying the imagined act of divesting himself of his mortal body. For it
74 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”