Of him I love day and night
Whitman takes up the traditional lyric themes of love and death, but in a surprising manner. The first words, “Of him I love day and night,” lead us to expect a paean to his loved one, perhaps a poem about how the threat of death makes love more precious. Instead, he journeys to a prophetic vision of death’s omnipresence on earth until, at the end, he is no longer talking about his lover but about “the corpse of any one I love” or “my own corpse.”
Whitman starts with a clear, passionate phrase, but he immediately inserts two distancing frames: he is recounting a dream, and the news comes second-hand: the poet “hears” that his lover is dead. Once again, he will be probing the lines between appearance and reality. Next, he doubles the absence: the lover is absent from life but also from his burial place. Whitman says, “I went where they had buried him,” making it seem certain that the lover died and was buried, but then immediately undercuts himself, because the lover, like Jesus, is not in his tomb.
We might then expect a poem about the lover’s resurrection, or, at least, a poem about how the lover’s presence is everywhere. Instead, Whitman writes about how death is everywhere. (Interestingly, in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass, he moved this poem into the new Whispers of Heavenly Death section).
Perhaps Whitman is indifferent to death because he believes in personal immortality, in what he calls “identity” beyond the grave. In this reading, the dead are everywhere because the soul never dies. Graves and memorials are irrelevant. The body decomposes or is cremated, but the soul survives and remains present to the living. Love need not fear death because love survives death. The repeated use of the word “satisfied” and the use of the word “indifferent” call to mind the ending of “Of the terrible question of appearances:” “I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity beyond the grave,/But I walk or sit indifferent – I am satisfied,/He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.”
But in this poem the lover has been erased by dream, death, and the progression of the poem itself. Instead of holding a lover close, Whitman ends with a dead body being scattered to the winds. In tone and emphasis, this is a different answer to the “terrible question of appearances.” Instead of “don’t be afraid of death, because love is here,” the poet seems to say: “don’t be afraid of death: it is already here.”
Whitman raises the specter of death-in-life that also worries Emerson and Thoreau: the feeling that, imprisoned by dead uses, shams, and delusions, men have become mere apologies for men, not daring to live, stuck in lives of quiet desperation, doing penance – the fear that when we come to die, we might discover that we have never lived. Death can become indifferent not because our souls are immortal but because they are dead: in our houses, streets, ships, cities, and places of amusement, we glide about like ghosts.