because his imagined communion with the heart of nature has provided
him with a buffer against the terror of death.
The passage excluded from “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” links
that poem to “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” the eloquent depiction
of a crisis in which the persona is again overcome by the fear that his faith
may be meaningless and that he has deluded himself into thinking that
he can ever hope to translate nature’s words.^22 The persona’s profound
alienation culminates when his despair brings him to the brink of physi-
cal death. This experience, however, is followed by intimations of his re-
covery and his ultimate transcendence. The persona, as Black points out,
hears “incompatible voices” of doubt and af¤rmation, those that articulate
“the idea that the self is immortal and in¤nite” and those that af¤rm that
“the knowledge that the self exists in nature and is, according to all ra-
tional evidence, mortal and ¤nite.”^23 The persona’s con®icting feelings of
hope and gloom—and Whitman’s unsettled doubts about penetrating
nature’s mysteries—are mirrored in the titles that Whitman gave the
poem. Its ¤nal title “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” clearly implies
despair and waning hope. Yet the poem originally appeared in the Atlan-
tic Monthly in 1859 with the hopeful title “Bardic Symbols,” identifying
Bard Whitman as a decipherer of nature’s clues. As if to con¤rm the
poem’s positive orientation, Whitman made it the lead poem in the up-
beat “Leaves of Grass” sequence in the 1860 edition. In 1867, he retitled
the poem “Elemental Drifts”—a sort of metaphysical pun that expresses
the persona’s desire to “impress others” with his mastery of the crypto-
grammic “drifts” that pervade the universe.^24 Moreover, the poem’s end-
ing implies that even after its speaker has endured an agonizing discon-
nect with nature, and after he has abased himself to the level of elemental
sand and ooze, he still aspires to translate the sea’s mysterious hymns of
death.
The sterile landscape pictured at the beginning of this “auto-elegy”^25
serves as the objective correlative of the persona’s devastated mood. On
an “autumn day” he walks endless miles along the barren Long Island
seashore and (in another example of the pathetic fallacy) hears what he
interprets to be the sea’s “sobbing dirge” for the dead, for the empty lives
of his fellow beings, and also for the cooling of his own inspirational ¤re.
He is wracked by the fear that his words no longer stem from his creative
selfhood but reveal only a hollowness at the core of his being and a sev-
ered contact with the universe. He fears that the sea no longer “rustles” at
“So Long!” / 139