Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.”
Whitman’s second great thought on life lies in his egoism. His intense sense of individuality was marked from the first; it is emphatically asserted in the “Song of Myself”—
“And nothing, not God, is Greater to one than one’s self is”—
where it lies side by side with his first great thought. But even in the “Song of Myself” it asserts a separate existence:
“This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?
And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.”
In the end he once, at least, altogether denies his first thought; he alludes to that body which he had called the equal of the soul, or even the soul itself, as excrement:
“Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned, or reduced to powder, or buried,