American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

Afterword: Objects

  Objects He is present now as never before. —  I loved him living, and I love him still. — .  [S]omehow even this dead form reached up to me, as if for a last embrace, and I held it in my arms long and long and pressed it with a passion of love. —  On March , , Whitman’s death unleashed waves of sorrow, relief, anxiety, and other forms of libidinal expressivity. His survivors caressed and kissed him with their good-byes. They made casts of his face and hands. They washed his body and prepared it for viewing and for burial. Busily, they came and went from the Mickle Street house, exchanging their tears and sighs for Walt and nursing their jealousies of one another. They gathered his effects and plotted the dissemination of his praise. On the day of the funeral, unnumbered mourners appeared, “as if risen by instinct from all quarters of the wind, till a magic stream was in full play . . . [l]etter carriers, policemen, railroadmen, ferrymen, school children , merchants—who was not included?” The great Shakespearean AFTERWORD  scholar Horace Howard Furness came to ask for a lock of Walt’s hair. John Burroughs and Horace Traubel held hands as they gazed into the coffin for the last time. At the cemetery, they spotted Peter Doyle on a nearby hill, “twirling a switch in his hand, his tall figure and big soft hat impressively set against the white-blue sky.” The mourners had heaped Whitman’s coffin with wreaths and blossoms so copiously that someone later remarked “he slept beneath a wilderness of flowers.” Whitman’s friends worked hard to produce a funeral that would express their own Whitmanian commitment to a certain kind of social and political order, a funeral “attended with no form and little ceremony ,” inclusive of—indeed attractive to—all the elements of a democratic throng: workingmen, street urchins, mothers and ministers, city officials, and “not a few artists.” An organized chaos, neither solemn nor hilarious, giving place to intimates (such as Burroughs) and, with some grousing, to the famous (particularly Richard Ingersoll), its management was also largely an affair of men. Mary Oakes Davis, Whitman’s housekeeper, “almost begged” for the privilege of washing the face of the corpse (it was granted; his male nurse, Warrie Fritzenger, washed the body). Whitman’s sister-in-law, Louisa, was discouraged from taking an active role in planning the funeral ceremony; Richard Bucke would not stand for her choice of eulogist. Graveside, the five speakers were all men. And the accounts of Whitman’s death and burial were for the most part either written or edited by Traubel. Elegies, of course, were immediately forthcoming. On March , Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote to Traubel from New York to say that as he would be unable to attend the funeral, he was sending a garland of flowers. “I have,” he continued, “hastily written a few broken & all unworthy lines, which I trust you will permit to stay with it.” Scribbled verses pinned to memorial wreaths gave way to more deliberate compositions, unfurled from the days and years that followed . Many, such as the elegiac sonnets by Francis Howard Williams and Robert Williams Buchanan, are mere unimaginative formalities. Traubel’s elegy, “Succession” (), is imitative of Whitman and egoistic in the touching manner of an abandoned acolyte not knowing how else to mourn but to aspire to the position of his priest. He exponentiates himself as the new apostle of lyric circulation:  AFTERWORD I sat by your bedside, I held your hand: Once you opened your eyes: O look of recognition! O look of bestowal! From you to me then passed the commission of the future, From you to me that minute, from your veins to mine,· · · · · · · · · O my great dead! You had not gone, you had stayed—in my heart, in my veins, Reaching through me, through others through me, through all at last, our brothers, A hand to the future. There is some of Whitman’s poignancy here, if not his sophistication, as Traubel tries to articulate for himself the central Whitmanian question : where and how does lyric address meet cultural transmission? Elegy, he finds, is poised at this crossroads, where Whitman himself had encountered it. Hand over hand, fresher and more energetic tributes came later, from Pound’s oedipally obnoxious “A Pact”—published in , the same year Apollinaire scandalized readers of the Mercure de...