(ectoplasmic?) state in which their new insubstantial “body” could even
pass through the physical bodies of living persons.^3 This minidrama of
death and trans¤guration is Whitman’s graphic answer to the rhetorical
question that he had previously posed: “Have you guessed you yourself
would not continue?” A somewhat similar explanation of this phenome-
non occurs in a massive tome by the Brooklyn spiritualist Andrew Jack-
son Davis: “Could you but turn your gaze from the lifeless body, which
no longer answers to your look of love; and could your spiritual eyes be
opened;” Jackson says, “you would behold—standing in your midst—a
form, the same, but more beautiful, and living! There is great cause to
rejoice at the birth of the spirit from this world into the inner sphere of
life.”^4 (Throughout Leaves of Grass Whitman pictures death as a birth, or
rebirth.)
A dirge-like intermezzo that links the cycles of seasonal renewal to the
cycles of human life marks the introduction of the poem’s centerpiece—
the description of the funeral of a Manhattan workman. An introduc-
tory couplet on the universality of death echoes Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”
Given Whitman’s early admiration of the “Thanatopsis” style and his
later praise of Bryant for treating death “as a natural fact,” this literary
echo is hardly an accident:
Slowmoving and black lines creep over the whole earth.... they
never cease.... they are the burial lines,
He that was President was buried, and he that is now President
shall surely be buried.^5Although memorial poems like Shelley’s “Adonais,” Arnold’s “Thyrsis,”
and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” celebrate notable, or at least respectable,
men and employ elaborate poetic machinery, America’s self-designated
poet of democracy rejected such practices in favor of eulogizing a desti-
tute forty-one-year-old omnibus driver, whose austere funeral is ¤nanced
by the contributions of coworkers and friends. Whitman was well ac-
quainted with such drivers on Manhattan’s Broadway, as he recalls in
Specimen Days. He fraternized with them, sometimes joined them as they
plied their routes, visited them in hospitals when they were injured, and
occasionally contributed money to aid them or to help defray the costs of
their funerals. He was attracted to them, as he was to other rugged young
workingmen, by their colorful ways, their native intelligence, and possibly
“Great Is Death” / 81