march past the immortal persona they turn “backwards or sideways to-
ward me to listen, with eyes retrospective towards me [emphasis added].”
“Proto-Leaf” stresses Whitman’s determination to compose poems of
death and immortality that “will show that nothing can happen more
beautiful than death,” that the quintessence of “the body and the mind...
adheres and goes forward, and is not dropt by death,” and that the inter-
play of life and death occurs in a “compact” time frame. But indicative of
the poet’s ongoing effort to de¤ne the key terms of his argument, the
poem again blurs the distinction between “body” and “soul” and, more
critically, between “mind” and “soul.” During our mortal span, the poem
implies, the body and the soul are coextensive and coterminal, and the
body serves as a mirror of the soul:
Was somebody asking to see the Soul?
See! your own shape and countenance—persons, substances,
beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands...
Behold! the body includes and is the meaning, the main
concern—and includes and is the Soul;
Whoever you are! How superb and how divine is your body, or
any part of it. [emphasis added]Although Whitman appears to treat the cohabiting soul and body even-
handedly in this rather pantheistic passage, he also implies that this part-
nership of equals will be terminated at death when the physical body is
sloughed off. For the body, which is the seat of physical pleasure, carries
the seed of death. The poet who had also assured his readers in “I Sing
the Body Electric” that the body is the soul here seems to shift his per-
spective as he informs them, in rather prosaic language, that following
their demise the soul will abandon its carnal body to become clad in a
“real” body—possibly the insubstantial “astral” body of the spiritualists—
while preserving its essential identity and its responsiveness to human
stimuli:
Of your real body, and any man’s or woman’s real body, item for
item, it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and pass to
¤tting spheres, carrying what has accrued to it from the moment
of birth to the moment of death.130 / “So Long!”