do-gooders” but also the “drunkards and informants and mean persons.”
“All is procession,” the poet af¤rms in “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855):
“The universe is a procession with measured and beautiful motion,” and
“each has his or her place in the procession.” And the poem of “Faces”
(1855) predicts a time when all humans will have been “unmuzzled” of
their animalistic traits and will have acquired their proper godlike vis-
ages.^9
“[T]here is strict account of all,” the speaker insists in “To Think of
Time”; both life and death are purposive and bene¤cial to all. Ten times
in the course of a seven-line catalogue the poem hammers home the as-
sertion that even the least valued persons “are not nothing”—the igno-
rant, the wicked, the “common people,” the cholera victims, prostitutes,
“atheists,” and (in keeping with the racialist theories of the time) those
who are members of “inferior” races are all subject to the process of on-
going cosmic advancement. In a sort of circular reasoning, the persona
explains that his faith in the workings of “the present and past law” is
con¤rmed by his intuitions and his dreams. Apparently persuaded that
the dreams of poets and visionaries are conduits for the “law” of mortality
and transcendence, he four times repeats the clause “I have dreamed.”
Linking his own eternal destiny to that of the mass of mankind, he cheer-
fully assures them that whatever happens in death and the afterlife is sure
to satisfy his own desires. Still, he so belabors the idea that death will
provide him with “satisfaction” that he betrays his anxiety about what
death may actually bring him. “I shall go with the rest.... we have sat-
isfaction,” he asserts. “And I have dreamed that the satisfaction is not
so much changed... and that there is no life without satisfaction.” “I
shall go with the rest, / We cannot be stopped at a given point... that is
no satisfaction; / To show us a good thing or a few good things for a
space of time—that is no satisfaction.” However, the cruel and senseless
deaths that Whitman witnessed during the Civil War apparently moti-
vated him to delete these tendentious assertions of “satisfaction” and to
substitute, in 1871, a “philosophical” couplet declaring “that the purpose of
the known life, the transient, / Is to form and decide identity for the un-
known life, the permanent.” Indeed, Whitman continued to depict death
as an outgrowth of life and to insist that the quality of one’s postmortal
existence depends, in no small measure, on the development of the physi-
cal and moral character nurtured during one’s lifetime. He seemed con-
vinced that the quality of a democratic society depends on its producing
84 / “Great Is Death”