different from what it is now, as it now is proportionately different from
what it was in its earlier gaseous or marine period, uncounted cycles be-
fore men and women grew. That we shall be here, proportionately differ-
ent from now and beautiful. That the Egyptian idea of the return of the
soul after a certain period involved a beautiful... nature... mystery.”^7
Whitman speculates about the afterlife in several poems that origi-
nated, in whole or in part, during the 1856–1859 period. “Proto-Leaf ”
(later “Starting from Paumanok”), the long quasi-autobiographical intro-
ductory poem of the 1860 edition,^8 notes the personal and ideological
“convulsions” that have gone into the shaping of the poet’s credo, and it
af¤rms his conviction that there is a spiritual dimension in every aspect
of the material world. The poem hints that the material and immaterial
(unseen) worlds coexist within a cosmic-spiritual matrix and that both
worlds yield clues to the nature of that matrix.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my Soul
and of immortality.From what he conceives to be his central position at the hub of the con-
centric universes—the seen and the unseen—the persona seemingly ab-
sorbs the emanations that ®ow inward to him from all persons and phe-
nomena and, in turn, enable him to become the spokesman from whom
these truths radiate outward. By locating the persona at the center of a
boundless and timeless world, the poet makes him an abiding presence in
the lives and in the deaths of the men and women of all generations. His
centrality and his capacity to perceive and to interpret the cryptic clues
embedded in every rock and plant and every mortal creature are his
de¤ning attribute in such poems as “Song of Myself ” and “Song of the
Open Road.” He delights in reading the “prophetic spirit of materials
shifting and ®ickering around me, / Wondrous interplay between the
seen and unseen... Extasy everywhere touching and thrilling me.”
“Proto-Leaf ” records a de¤ning visionary moment during which the per-
sona beholds the successive generations of American “masses” as they
“debouch” on the Western lands, “projected through time,” and providing
“for me an audience interminable.” As these “millions” of Americans
“So Long!” / 129