A more personalized version of this concept occurs in “To One Shortly
to Die,” one of the cluster of short “Messenger Leaves” poems. There the
tender persona, seated like a priest at the bedside of an unidenti¤ed ex-
piring individual, absolves him or her “from all except yourself—that is
eternal.” (My italics stress that it is precisely one’s selfhood—one’s iden-
tity and spiritual essence—that Whitman presumes to be indestructible.)
The abandoned body becomes worthless, like the slag that remains after
the pure ore has been extracted. But once liberated from the physical
body, the persona declares, the soul will persevere in its eternal quest.
Whereas some poems had de¤ned the persona’s selfhood in terms of the
splendid body that coexists with his immortal soul, Whitman now dis-
misses the body with the contemptuous remark that “the corpse you will
leave will be but excrementious.” Nevertheless, he assures the dying per-
son that “there is nothing to be commiserated” about dying. Displaying
the celebrated Whitman bedside manner that will manifest itself in the
military hospitals during the war years, the persona congratulates the dy-
ing person because “I am with you” as the “sun bursts through in un-
looked-for directions.” These words seem to hint that the persona (like
the god Hermes) is well acquainted with spirit-journeys from life to
death. In the course of Leaves of Grass he makes, or imagines that he
makes, several such excursions.
“A Song of Joys” is a virtual piñata of the “joys” that the persona, or
Whitman himself, has experienced directly or vicariously—each “joy” ac-
corded a separate stanza. Throughout the poem the persona rejoices in
his sense of in¤nitude and his conviction that his immortal soul is always
gleaning spiritual satisfactions. (In lines added to the poem in 1871, the
persona even anticipates “[p]rophetic joys of better, loftier love’s ideals,
the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade.”)^9 But the poem also
illustrates how the persona thrills to the scenes of the violent death that
he conjures up, like those of the “mashed ¤reman” and the deadly naval
battle in “Song of Myself.” In “A Song of Joys” he relives such brutal
moments as those of “the strong-brawned ¤ghter... thirsting to meet
his opponent”; “soldiers dying in battle without complaint”; “the savage
taste of blood” and the “gloat[ing] so over the wounds and death of the
enemy”; the “joys” of imagining the wounded whale’s agony during a
whale hunt, when it feels “a lance driven through his side, pressed deep,
turned in the wound.” The persona’s “joys” range from those of the vio-
“So Long!” / 131