I advance personally.” Mystically integrated into his ever-living volume of
poems, and seemingly aroused by the contact of his electric spirit with
that of the reader who holds a copy of the poems in his or her warm hand,
he becomes the reader’s spirit-lover. As we know, Whitman generally
avoided describing the afterlife; he conceived of it neither as an everlast-
ing bacchanalia nor as what Robert Louis Stevenson derided as “this fairy
tale of an eternal tea party.”^57 But Whitman here invents a scene in which
his book and his persona, the past and the present, sensation and spirit
merge in a death fantasy that takes on a life of its own. In words charged
with tremulous emotion and in short, choppy phrases that mimic the
persona’s hard breathing, the ostensibly dead persona cries out:
This is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.O how your ¤ngers drowse me!
Your breath falls around me like dew—your pulse lulls the
tympans of my ears,
I feel immerged from head to foot,
Delicious—enough.The passage has intriguing rami¤cations. At one level, the persona’s imag-
ined encounter resembles a passionate assignation. As his lover slumbers
after their lovemaking, his (her?) pulse “lulls the tympans of my ears.” (In
a “Children of Adam” poem the persona recalls lying in bed with his
lover’s arm beneath his head and hearing the sound of “little bells last
night under my ear.”)^58 His exclamation, “Enough! O deed impromptu
and secret!” suggests the possibility of a troubled Victorian conscience
following a surreptitious assignation. At another level, the persona’s be-
havior may be likened to that of the cabalistic ¤gure of the gilgul, the
wandering and disembodied soul of a dead person that enters and pos-
sesses the body and soul of a living person.^59 In a more elevated sense, the
persona’s action may represent the godlike act of infusing the persona’s
inspirational powers into a living subject; in James M. Cox’s apt phrase,
“the words of the poet will die into and become the ®esh of the reader.”^60
“So Long!” / 157