I believe I have this night thought a thought of the clef of eternity”—a
momentous intimation that seems to penetrate his “body and soul.” This
vision reinforces his faith that life and death are a continuum of experi-
ence and that “a vast similitude interlocks all”—every phase of animate
and inanimate existence: “All the substances of the same, and all that is
spiritual, upon the same.... All souls—all living bodies, though they be
ever so different, or in different worlds” (emphasis added). (That “simili-
tude” interlocking mortal experience and whatever may follow is a strik-
ing illustration of what Whitman calls the “law.”) Playfully speculating
that he may “be eligible to visit the stars” in this life, or in the lives to
come, he tempers his enthusiasm with the thought that he may never-
theless ¤nd nothing more “mystic and beautiful” in his future existence
than what he has known on earth. He refuses to accept the thought that
the identity he has developed in the known life will be obliterated or
changed into something qualitatively different in any postmortem exis-
tence. Indeed, the 1856 version of “Clef Poem” succeeds in being both a
fascinating exercise in fantasy and a vital representation of Whitman’s
thoughts about immortality and the life-death continuum. In retaining
only the two introductory lines and the last eleven lines of “Clef Poem”
in 1867 to create “On the Beach at Night Alone” Whitman expunged the
poem’s self-questioning about the possibility of an afterlife but preserved
the terse but brilliant analogy, “A vast similitude interlocks all,” that af-
¤rms a faith in immortality consistent with his later pose as a guru of
death.
3
Three major poems that ¤rst appeared in the 1856 edition—“Poem of
Salutation” (“Salut au Monde!”), “Poem of the Road” (“Song of the Open
Road”), and “Sun-Down Poem” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)—describe
visionary journeys in which the persona reaches out to masses of people
in order to proclaim the in¤nitude of the soul and to demonstrate his
boundless empathy. In the ¤rst of the two “movements” of “Salut au
Monde!” the persona undertakes a clairvoyant journey beyond the limi-
tations of space and time. He imagines himself circumnavigating the
earth, as though he were aloft in a balloon, naming, as he passes by, the
continents, oceans, and nations he beholds below him. However, he does
110 / “The Progress of Souls”