by their sexual allure. Cataloging the harsh work routine of the poem’s
stage driver in the driver’s own jargon, Whitman makes him exemplify
the humble and despairing men and women to whom this funerary poem
is addressed.^6 The short tribute to this non-hero characterizes him a
“goodfellow” who was “freemouthed, quicktempered,” a brawler, and a
womanizer—hardly a suitable subject for the traditional elegy. The poem
describes the driver’s corpse being brought to the cemetery for burial
in winter, under a “gray discouraged sky overhead” (the pathetic fallacy
again). Given the urban setting, we may assume that the driver’s burial
did not occur in one of the wayside cemeteries romanticized by the older
poets but that his modest and impersonal interment took place in one of
the urban cemeteries that had become available to the poor in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century. It is also likely that the corpse was
prepared for burial by an undertaking establishment, six of which had
been established in Suffolk and Queen’s Counties alone by 1860.^7 “He is
decently put away.... is there anything more?” challenges the persona,
thus mocking the elaborate ritualization of death but once again raising
the frightening specter that there may not be “anything more” beyond the
grave. A taunting question like “is there anything more?” challenges us to
balance our sense of loss for those we have loved against our desire to
believe that death does not mark the extinction of the soul and of per-
sonal identity.
The ¤nal two-thirds of “To Think of Time” (sections 5 through 9—
some 100 of the poem’s 153 lines in the original version) constitutes a
plain-spoken appeal to the masses to have faith that there is indeed a life
beyond the grave and that such life must needs be “satisfactory”—a term
often repeated in the ¤rst edition of the poem. (References to the satis-
faction associated with death were subsequently deleted from the poem,
along with sizable portions of the original text.) The persona’s preoccu-
pation with the expected “satisfaction” he will ¤nd in death expresses his
yearning for a postmortal state of spiritually enhanced values, beyond
good and evil, but it also demonstrates his suppressed uncertainty and the
important role of wish-ful¤llment in his thinking.
The vulgar and the re¤ned.... what you call sin and what you
call goodness.. to think how wide a difference;
To think the difference will still continue to others, yet we lie
beyond the difference.82 / “Great Is Death”