"Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots, you make me think of death. Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?) I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death, For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers, Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer (I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most) Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean----" This is strange, from the exultant Walt. Death! Death is now his chant! Death! Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge. The great merge into the womb. Woman. And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man love. And almost immediately with this, death, the final merge of death. There you have the progression of merging. For the great mergers, woman at last becomes inadequate. For those who love to extremes. Woman is inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of man-for-man love. And this is on the brink of death. It slides over into death. David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan. It always slides into death. The love of comrades. Merging. So that if the new Democracy is to be based on the love of comrades, it will be based on death too. It will slip so soon into death. The last merging. The last Democracy. The last love. The love of comrades. Fatality. And fatality. Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was the goal of his manhood. To the mergers, there remains the brief love of comrades, and then Death. "Whereto answering, the sea Delaying not, hurrying not Whispered me through the night, very plainly before daybreak, Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death. And again death, death, death, death. Hissing melodions, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart, But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, Death, death, death, death, death----" Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life. A very great post mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet of the soul's last shout and shriek, on the confines of death. _Après moi le déluge._ But we have all got to die, and disintegrate. We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live. But even then the goal is not death. Something else will come. "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking." We've got to die first, anyhow. And disintegrate while we still live. Only we know this much. Death is not the _goal._ And Love, and merging, are now only part of the death-process. Comradeship--part of the death-process. Democracy--part of the death-process. The new Democracy--the brink of death. One Identity--death itself.