“I know I am deathless,” Whitman wrote, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. “I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.”
And yet he did die, on this date, in 1892, at 6:43 in the evening. His last words were directed to his attendant, Warren Fritzinger: “Warry, shift.” (Whitman had become too weak to turn himself in bed.) According to an account in the New York Times, the poet’s heart continued to beat “ten minutes after there was any noticeable respiration. He remained conscious until the last.”
Whitman’s ability to remain conscious, to attend to all around him, was part of his genius. As Leslie Jamison writes, in the introduction to a new edition of Specimen Days, “Whitman loved the world in its dross and guts and glitter, in its everything—the tulip trees and all trees, the glowworms and all worms. The long lines of his poems spoke his urgent need to craft a lyric that could hold it all.” He was the poet of the present—of Brooklyn’s “ample hills,” of Virginia’s battlefields—and he was the poet of the future: a future that couldn’t possibly (physically) contain him.
In his mid-thirties, working on the poem that would, in later versions, be called “Song of Myself,” he imagined his death-which-is-not-death, his transfer of matter and energy:
I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
Earlier in the poem, he offers this bit of consolation:
All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
To which I always want to shout, “You can’t know that!” But he can. Or the poem can.
(In 2002 I wrote 225 greeting card verses for Microsoft Publisher. For one of the Loss/Sympathy cards, I used the first half of Whitman’s declaration—“All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses”—but I couldn’t bring myself to include the rest of it. I apologize, Walt! The passage will live forever because of that “luckier.”)
Today, 123 years after Whitman took his last breath (and, better detail, refused his last sip of milk punch), one of my poetry classes will be discussing his work. The students spent yesterday “forging” some of his poems: coming up with new endings to “The Last Invocation” (in which Whitman’s soul takes reluctant leave of his body) and “O Me! O Life!” (which—spoiler alert—ends: “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse”). We’ll do a read-around—Whitman will talk, the students will talk. It’ll feel, I’m quite sure, like a conversation.
Which is to say: he died, and he didn’t die. He’s buried in a granite tomb in Camden, and he’s behind me right now in Ann Arbor. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I believe in Whitman—the Whitman who writes, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
