love—can the vision [of immortality] be clear to a use the most sublime.”
And these qualities certainly characterize the Whitman persona.^1 “A Song
for Occupations” is permeated, particularly in its 1855 version, by a subtext
of death. Its stunning catalogues of occupations and crafts, their tools and
skills, appeal to the American “workmen and workwomen” to recognize
their own potential greatness. During this era in which the labors of
skilled craftsmen provided a measure of personal satisfaction, the poet
seeks to assure them that further satisfactions await them when their
mortal lives have ended. Resuming the theme of happiness with which
he concludes “Song of Myself,” the persona offers them neither doctrine
nor moralizing but rather the assurance that “life upon the appleshaped
earth and we upon it.... surely the drift of them is something grand.”
“A Song for Occupations” is followed by “To Think of Time,” Whit-
man’s ¤rst full-dress poem on the theme of death—a poem that is popu-
lated by the dead and their corpses. (Untitled, like all of the poems in the
1855 edition, it was called “Burial Poem” in 1856, and given its present title
in 1871.) At the heart of the poem are the persona’s fascination with the
dead, his latent terror of death, and his desire to discover how a better
understanding of death and decay might afford him a measure of emo-
tional stasis. With its repeated death motifs and phrases and its shifts in
rhythm and voice, the poem reads as if Whitman’s musical contemporar-
ies Berlioz and Liszt had inspired a poetic rhapsody on death. Its opening
lines (which lack both subject and verb) announce that the poem is, in
fact, a meditation. Fourteen of its ¤rst sixty-two lines begin with the
words “To think”:
To think of time... to think through the retrospection,
To think of today.. and the ages continued henceforward.As he does in “Song of Myself,” Whitman de¤nes time both as a means
to measure our daily activities and as an indicator of the in¤nitude of our
existence. As the persona absorbs “all that retrospection” of the past, he
downplays life’s sorrows and defeats and considers the satisfactions of
day-to-day existence. Time, he concludes, works in our favor, regardless
of our circumstances. And as he does in “A Song for Occupations,” he
draws analogies between the satisfactions of the past and those of the
present and extrapolates the likelihood of continued satisfactions in any
life to come. Intent on demonstrating that death is not to be feared, he
78 / “Great Is Death”