poses three critical questions by which to measure one’s fear of the grave,
addressed as much to himself as to the reader:
Have you guessed you yourself would not continue? Have you
dreaded those earth-beetles?
Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?Given the Whitman persona’s faith in personal survival, these questions
may appear to be merely rhetorical. But latent in their wording is his
struggle against a lingering fear that mortal existence could possibly be
followed by an eternal “nothing.” The fearful possibility that dying leads
to nothingness rings like a tocsin throughout the poem. The emotional
responses that the persona develops to these questions are designed to
persuade us—and himself—that death is not “nothing” and to validate
his belief in immortality. The poem’s principal argument for immortality
is its grand analogy between the earth’s inexhaustible capacity to renew
its sumptuous vegetation and a corresponding potential for universal
spiritual renewal.
The poem introduces a vignette picturing death among the lowly; its
opening lines could have been written by young William Cullen Bryant,
the American poet Whitman most admired:
Not a day passes.. not a minute or second without an
accouchement;
Not a day passes.. not a minute or second without a corpse.The word accouchement (like accoucheur in section 49 of “Song of Myself ”)
repeats the familiar concept that birth and death are equally parturitions
into another state of being. “To Think of Time” dramatizes this idea in a
vignette that pictures the humble deathbed scene of a unnamed person
of unspeci¤ed sex. The scene has an immediacy that suggests the poet’s
¤rst-hand observation of deathbeds. In the ¤rst half of the nineteenth
century, particularly in rural areas such as the Long Island where Whit-
man grew up, participating in the death watch and preparing the dead for
burial were still revered as family and community duties. “When a death
occurred,” it has been noted, “the community acted. The family of the
deceased washed him, laid him out and prepared him for burial. There
were women in the community who functioned as ‘layers out of the dead,’
“Great Is Death” / 79