Foreword

Four exclamation marks open this section as the poet suddenly regains the energy and desire to rise up from the humiliating position of the beggar that he found himself in at the end of the previous section. In one of the most rousing moments of the poem, he shouts a threefold reprimand to himself: “Enough! enough! enough!” Yes, he realizes, we must recognize the death, suffering, sickness, pain, and abjection in the world, but we must also realize that, horrific as it may at times seem, that dark side of life is never the whole story. We may be momentarily stunned by the terrors we encounter, the pain we witness, but we must rise again from it and carry on into the future. It is a pledge that he would once again make during and after the Civil War, when he and the nation needed to absorb 800,000 deaths and find a way to build a future out of the carnage instead of seeing the carnage itself as the definition of what the country had become .

In this section, the poet finds himself “on the verge of a usual mistake,” the error of mistaking the mockery and insults and tears and blows as the essential meaning of life. “I resume the overstaid fraction,” the poet says, indicating that when we encounter the most painful parts of experience, they can come to seem all-consuming, as we forget the generative and loving and developing aspects of life. Those sunnier aspects form the majority of life’s moments, even if, during bleak times, that larger fraction can be eclipsed and lost for awhile. The poet now reclaims this fraction that has stayed away too long. And, as he does so, he evokes the story of Christ’s resurrection but does so in a remarkably secular way: we all experience a “crucifixion and bloody crowning.” We all bear a cross, wear a crown of thorns, and we must all learn—as Whitman has been instructing us in this poem—to take on the suffering and pain of others. And then we must all resurrect ourselves, heal our gashes, rise again to do the work of building a wide-ranging democracy. In his notes for this section, Whitman made the association of the poet with an American Christ even more explicit: “In vain were nails driven through my hands, / I remember my crucifixion and bloody coronation /. . . I am alive in New York and San Francisco / Again I tread the streets after two thousand years.” American history has been full of bloodshed and loss, but the country has to depend on its abilities to absorb the loss and rise up with renewed purpose, resurrecting a future for itself that might be worthy of the sacrifices of its past. We must become a nation that does not so much believe in one particular resurrection but rather in the endless possibility of resurrection, life out of death—a nation of democratic Christs from New York to San Francisco.

So the poet is now ready to “troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession”: he is not a divine figure in the sense of being more pure or closer to God than anyone else. The nature of democracy is that we are all equally close to God in that we are all part of one ongoing democratic development, recognizing the divine in each and every individual, average and unending as we proceed to the future: “Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines.” It’s the uneasy call of manifest destiny, the call for all to rise from the death and defeat of history to build together a future in yet uncharted lands. So he calls us together—his “eleves,” his pupils (Whitman uses the French perhaps as a nod to the active role of students who stood up to and helped topple antidemocratic forces in the 1848 French Revolution)—to continue with him on this poetic journey, to take notes, and, most of all, as we go forward, to question, always question.