Lecture Notes on Sleep and Death - American Romanticism | ENGLISH 272, Assignments of English Language

Download Lecture Notes on Sleep and Death - American Romanticism | ENGLISH 272 and more Assignments English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Sleep and Death Caroline Cassidy English 272: American Romanticism 19 December 2008 In Walt Whitman’s The Sleepers, a small part of his famous Leaves of Grass, he makes many connections between sleep and death. In this poem he is describing many different people sleeping and the things they are dreaming about. Through all of this he constantly uses death- like imagery or explicitly mentions and describes death in the people’s dreams. Whitman uses these two things to show how alike everyone is, despite their many differences while awake and alive. No matter what, he tells the reader, everyone must sleep and, similarly, everyone must die. Water and the color white play important roles in The Sleepers as well, in that they unite these three things (death, sleep and equality) together completely. They are mentioned in nearly every dream, and are usually closely related to whatever sort of death is involved. The first and third stanzas of Poem 1, the very beginning of the entire section, mention, or at least hint at, death. The first stanza presents the narrator slowly making his way around the bodies of sleeping people; he is constantly “Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping” (l. 5). This lack of motion is obviously supposed to signify sleep, but on a deeper level it can also be symbolic of death, the stopping of life. The third stanza is the first place he actually describes the people he is gazing upon. One might expect him to mention such tender scenes as a mother with a sleeping child or a husband and wife first, but these do not come until later. Whitman first describes more macabre scenes: the sick, the dead, drunkards, and war-mangled corpses. Right from the beginning of the poem the reader is confronted with a link between sleep and death. He mentions first and foremost the people who are the most asleep, so to speak. Whitman then writes about mothers, lovers, the blind, and prisoners, and describes in detail the physical positions they have assumed or how they sleep. More importantly, he makes battle and sees the slaughter of his men, and cries because he cannot do anything. Here, his tears link this scene to the water of the two previous poems. Also, the fact that “the color is blanched from his cheeks” again reminds the reader of the white, sleeping corpse in the very beginning, as well as the body of the drowning swimmer (l. 103). The dead and dying soldiers in Poem 5 bring the reader’s attention to Poem 1 as well, and its description of “gashed bodies on battlefields” (l. 9). At the end of Poem 5 Washington says goodbye to his army, which is also symbolic of death. The rest of The Sleepers is different from the first two parts. It still makes death and sleep look very similar, and still uses water to connect the whole poem, but it does so in a different way. Rather than detailing violent dreams filled with gory death, it is about returning home. This is mostly done in Poem 7. Lines 142-149 describe all kinds of immigrants and fugitives returning safely to their homes: “The fugitive returns unharmed….the immigrant is back beyond the months and years” (l. 143). This mass returning home is representative of how all people return to whatever state they were in before they were born. Or, to be more religious about things (as Whitman often seems to be), it is symbolic of going back to live in peace with God. Also, this long list of different nationalities and of different kind of people (as described in the following stanza) shows how all of them are equals in sleep and in death. In death, as in their dreams, it no longer matters if these people are exiles, wealthy, lost, sick, or anything else, they are still able to return to wherever it is they are from. As Whitman puts it, “I swear they are averaged now….one is no better than the other,/ The night and sleep have likened them and restored them” (l. 160-161). And it is water, the continuous link of this poem, which brings many of them back. Like death, the water is indifferent to who these people are or what they have done to be expelled from their homes. It quietly and unquestioningly brings them wherever they most desire to go, as death inevitably brings everyone to a peaceful state. The final poem, Poem 8, brings all of these important elements together and to a beautiful close, although most are used more implicitly than they were before. Water is still present, albeit symbolically—it is not mentioned outright, but the narrator describes how the sleepers “flow” across the earth as they lie (l. 180). He also uses the word “white” to describe the hair of a mother and the wrist of her daughter (l. 185). This again brings the reader back to the white- featured corpses of Poem 1 and of the struggling swimmer of Poem 3. It is a final reminder of the struggle against the world faced by the swimmer and by all people, and that no one will survive this struggle. A few lines down, Whitman describes the sick, and how in sleep their suffering is temporarily relieved: “The sweatings and fevers stop…the throat that was unsound is sound…the lungs of the consumptive are resumed…the poor distressed head is free” (l. 190). This further connects sleep with death as death, too, ends all suffering. Whatever ails people during the day is eased at night, just as whatever sicknesses people are plagued with throughout their lives end when they die. The final stanza of Poem 8, and of The Sleepers as a whole, makes the connection between death and sleep stronger still. The narrator says, “I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return to you” (l. 202). It is as if the narrator is making a promise to death: that he will return to it after being alive for a while. In referencing the inevitability of day turning to night, wakefulness turning to sleep, he implies the inevitability of life turning to death. From here the reader can think back to the line in Poem 1 about “The newborn emerging from gates and the dying emerging from gates” (l. 10). This again demonstrates naturalness of this cycle. Throughout The Sleepers, Whitman constantly makes connections between life and death. He does this by describing people’s dreams—they frequently dream of death, which is like catching a glimpse of what is to come for them. Whitman also emphasizes the equality of all these sleeping people, how they are all alike when they are asleep despite who they are while awake. This is similar to what death does—everyone must die eventually, and everyone is the same when they are dead. No more distinctions are made past that point. To unite all these ideas, Whitman uses such imagery as water and the color white throughout the poem.