I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over, My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern, Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun, Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist, Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran, Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me, Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits. One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey. Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded, Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical, I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief. How the flukes splash! How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood! Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers, I take my place among you as much as among any, The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same, And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same. I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail. Each who passes is consider'd, each who stops is consider'd, not a single one can it fail. It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried, Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side, Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again, Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall, Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad dis- order, Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd, nor the brutish koboo call'd the ordure of humanity, Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in, Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth, Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them, Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.
Afterword
A summer festival on the waterfront of a New England town. Sunlight and blue skies and salt air. Tourists and townspeople, some pushing strollers, some eating ice cream or sipping coffee, drift past white tents in which vendors offer seascapes, stained glass, baked goods. Many stop to look at Plymouth Rock, where the pilgrims from Mayflower supposedly disembarked in 1620. At the wharf, a replica of the merchant ship that brought them to the New World lies in her berth, with actors playing the roles of shipmates and passengers, reciting a version of the history taught to American schoolchildren. The Mayflower Compact looms large in any telling: how all the adult males, saints and strangers alike (the terms, respectively, for the faithful and those who made the perilous journey for the sake of trade or adventure), pledged while still aboard ship to “covenant and combine [them]selves together into a civil body politic.” Here was the cornerstone of democracy, the origin of the new faith that Whitman extols in this section.
What strikes the reader is the range of reference that the poet employs in his catalogue of ancient and modern belief systems, each of which contributes to his revelation that the individual is the measure of the cosmos. He yokes together every religion to prepare the ground for “what is yet untried and afterward,” what will suffice for us all, now “Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,” now “Drinking mead from the skull-cap,” now “sitting patiently in a pew.” And more: in “the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief” there is a force that crests in us at every moment: the here and now. His surging lines will teach us how to ride it.
William Bradford, a signatory of the Mayflower Compact and governor of the Plymouth Colony, wrote: “as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.” Whitman turned that candle into song.
Question
Whitman was very aware that he was writing his poem for readers who did not exist when he wrote the poem. In a very real way, then, we are, for Whitman, the “afterlife.” We had no bodies, no identities, when he lived, but he had faith we would emerge out of the identities and bodies that he and all those who lived 150 years ago left behind. What physical ways do you see your own body and the bodies of those alive now living off of the material remains of bodies that were once alive, and what signs do you see that you are living off of the ideas, beliefs, doubts, successes, and errors of those now dead? Can religious faith be built on such a materialistic basis—that the physical world just keeps transforming and transmuting into an endless ongoing present (which is the only place that “afterlife” can occur)?