PARADOX OF IDENTITY
387
Whitman with an almost religious intensity-and bringing with it,
however bitter the shock, its own joy and power of redemption–
can one account for that extreme identification of the spiritual es–
aence of life with the organic modes of its birth and dissolution (and
for his view, too, of the poetic imagination as, to quote Richard
Chase, "a mode of the sense of death") that lies at the heart of his
sensibility and which gives his verse its universality of appeal-even
to
temperaments so distant as the Latin or the Catholic mind: his
sense, namely, of an infinite promise in the body, his belief in the
flesh as the sacred and definitive human substance.
"I cannot understand the mystery," Whitman had written in
his
notebook in 1847, "but I am always conscious of myself as two–
as my
soul and I-and I reckon it is the same with all men and
women." This, the ambivalence Whitman had always known-of
"childhood and manhood", of private "soul" and worldly "I"-ceased
to
be a mute and paralytic conflict and became
his
lyrical dialogue,
his
antiphonal "song of myself," when he felt and could express their
unconscious struggle as the rhythmic energy of Eros, as not only the
human but the elementary organic mystery of change and possibility
in
the world. And so strong was
his
sense of power in at last being
able to find in images of non-self a relativity for his mystery, that at
first
it seems to have been enough for Whitman simply to "celebrate"
his
inward paradox:
I am satisfied-I see, dance, laugh, sing:
As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side
all night and close on the peep of day,
And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels,
bulging the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization, and
scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of
two, and which is ahead?
Here and in most of "The Song of Myself" Whitman was con–
tent
to let even such obscurely troubled questions as this stand rhyth–
mically
as their own answers: he would exult in the self as he did
