I am the poet of strength and hope,
To anyone dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will.
O despairer, here is my neck, hang your whole weight upon me,
Let the physician and the priest go home,
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.
Sleep—I and they keep guard all night,
By God, you shall not go down!
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so. 
(Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick.)

I sing of life, yet mind me well of death.
After the rest has been comprehended and said, even the grandest, and the pervading fact of visible existence is rounded and apparently completed, it still remains to be really completed by suffusing through the whole that other pervading invisible fact. I am not sure but the last enclosing sublimation of human race or poem is what it thinks of death. 

But I do not understand the least reality of life—
I should like to know, what is life?—
How then can I understand the realities of death, 
And the impenetrable uncertainty of the afterwards?
I do not understand the realities of death, but I know they are great—
O mystery of death, I pant for the time when I shall solve you!

Yet we should all accept the solution that there is no solution,
No man ever knows here, no man ever came back to tell us.
So the grappled mystery of all earth’s ages old or new,
Elusive, present, baffled, by each successive age insoluble, pass’d on,
To ours today, and we pass on the same.

To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,
Life and death, the two old, simple problems ever intertwined,
Life’s ever-modern rapids soon, soon to blend with the old streams of death.
Life is the whole law and incessant effort of the visible universe,
And death only the other or invisible side of the same. 

The all-engrossing thought and fact of death is admitted not for itself so much as a powerful factor in the adjustments of life—
Unfulfilled aspirations, ideal dreams, the mysteries and failures and broken hopes of life,
Then death the common fate of all.
And portals: what are those of life but for death?
Lives and works, what are they all at last, except the roads to faith and death?
Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never cease—they are the burial lines,
Wending to the exit—vanishing to sight and ear—and never materializing on this earth’s stage again! 

Yea, death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
We mourn the fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
The young untimely drawn to thee.
We mourn the old—
The death of Mrs. Gilchrist is indeed a gloomy fact,
Seems to me mortality never enclosed a more beautiful spirit,
Nothing now remains but a sweet and rich memory,
And this a memory-leaf for her dear sake.

Lost, by death, my dear, dear mother—and, just before, my sister Martha—the two best and sweetest women I have ever seen or known, or éver expect to see.
The blank in life and heart left by the death of my mother will never to me be filled,
It is the great cloud to temper the rest of my life.
Mother, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
I see again the calm benignant face, fresh and beautiful still,
I sit by the form in the coffin,
I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin.

While I sat in the day and look’d forth,
The infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the voices of children and women,
And the cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail.

With the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death—
I am sure that whatever death is it is all right.

NEXT: THE PROCESS OF DEATH AND BURIAL

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).