Here the reader is challenged to identify both the “we” who will “lie be-
yond the difference” and the nature of that “difference.” Is the persona
identifying with the dead (the “we”) and speaking as though he has be-
come privy to their secret? His words can possibly be construed that way.
In ringing monosyllables that proclaim “what will be will be well—for
what is is well,” he reiterates his faith that postmortal existence must
prove at least as satisfying as our mortal lives have been. His implied
promise to the masses is that death means more than an abstract immor-
tality or the mere avoidance of personal annihilation; his promise em-
bodies the assurance that one’s selfhood—the unique character that one
develops during a lifetime—cannot be “diffused” or annihilated during
whatever cycles of one’s existence may follow the Biblically allotted three
score and ten. In emotionally charged words he tries to assure the reader
that the universe is not purposeless, that he is “well-considered” and that
one’s core identity (the “Myself ” or “Yourself!”) will remain inviolable and
will endure through time.
You are not thrown to the winds.. you gather certainly and
safely around yourself,
Yourself! Yourself! Yourself for ever and ever!Having perhaps surmised that this argument is not altogether convincing
because it is not readily demonstrable (the preservation of one’s personal
identity following death was hardly a unanimous position among theolo-
gians), Whitman once again retreats to what might be called his fail-safe
position by invoking what “Song of Myself ” terms “the same old law.”
The rather nebulous “law,” mentioned over one hundred times in Leaves
of Grass, assumes the existence throughout nature of an innate urge to-
ward perfection—manifested in humans as a moral force that operates
both within us and beyond us. Whitman’s melding of the nineteenth-
century belief in progress with elements of popular religion and “heredi-
tary science” reminds us how deeply he was in®uenced by the quasi-
religious theories of physiological and moral reform promoted by the
publishing ¤rm of Fowler and Wells, which distributed this ¤rst edi-
tion of Leaves of Grass and, in 1856, covertly published the second edition.^8
The “law of promotion and transformation,” the poem explains, operates
through time to advance not only the “great masters and kosmos” (terms
with which Whitman characterizes his own persona) and the “heroes and
“Great Is Death” / 83