Poetry Review – Walt Whitman – The Sleepers Verse 2

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An 1855 poem in which Whitman travels the astral plane, moving into the minds and souls of people living and dead. In this verse he samples both states of being simultaneously. He enters the body of a young dead man and that of the grieving grandmother who is preparing his burial shroud stocking. He senses both the grieving woman preparing the body and being in the corpse as it is laid in its coffin and buried. Though he finds the sensation of death still and soothing, and the woman’s despair to be distressing, he still concludes that being alive is best. Surprisingly not a creepy but a metaphysical poem, given its fixation on the dead. Whitman's message is clearly that living in despair is always better than the stillness of the grave even if there is no Hellfire and torment in death. Arthur Chappell