Walt Whitman also tells us "that nothing can happen more beautiful
than death," and he has exprest the humanist view of mortality in
a hymn which his admirers regard as the high-water mark of modern
poetry. But will this rhapsody bear thinking about? Is death
"delicate, lovely and soothing," "delicious," coming to us with
"serenades"? Does death "lave us in a flood of bliss"? Does "the body
gratefully nestle close to death"? Do we go forth to meet death "with
dances and chants of fullest welcome"? It is vain to attempt to hide
the direst fact of all under plausible metaphors and rhetorical
artifice. It is in defiance of all history that man so write. It is in
contradiction of the universal instinct. It is mockery to the dying.
It is an outrage upon the mourners. The Elizabethan masters were far
truer to the fact; so is the modern skeptic who shrinks at "the black
and horrible grave." Men never speak of delicious blindness, of
delicious dumbness, of delicious deafness, of delicious paralysis; and
death is all these disasters in one, all these disasters without hope.
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