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Essay on Whitman's The Sleepers
This paper is on Walt Whitman's poem "The Sleepers". It explores the voices, visions, and roles assumed by the speaker. It further explains how does this poem, with its emphasis on sleepers in the night, expand and/or complicate our understanding of Whitman's work and its aim?
In the poem "The Sleepers," Whitman falls into the undefined dream territory of the mind with such power and enlightenment that exceeds Poe on his own grounds. The speaker of the poem realizes limitations and troubles of his own personality in the image of a sleeper, which he expands to embrace a dreamlike image of sleepers all over the world. He dreams his death in the demolition of heroic swimmer, who in turn transforms to an image of the dead fallen in war, particularly the American Revolution. By means of growing authority and ambiguity, images shift backward in time to a primeval America told of by his mother.
A strange Indian woman appears and disappears, portraying a type of a primitive energy to Whitman. The poem shifts next to a recollection or dream of summer, representing perfect happiness, but it also finds its beauty in the distorted and contaminated. The poem appears into one form at the end, an image of night as a mother combines pain, ignorance, unreality, and consciousness. "The Sleepers" is a radiant poem of cataleptic force. It is also very typically Whitmanesque. The terrifying dive into the depths of the sea, to extort a confirmation from death, and the come back demonstrate the usual recurring movement and rhythm of Whitman's feeling.
The narrator, actually dwelling in the perception of one of his dreamers, discovers himself watching a "beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked" through the sea. The beautiful man swims through eddies that become progressively more frightening, even harmful perhaps, in their wish to ruin the swimmer the speaker hates the "eddies that would dash [the swimmer] head-foremost on the rocks". At several points, the narrator, sees himself in a kind of dream-logic that lets him identify some things and not others he is omniscient, as the frame has established, but it seems that................
