“God’s Purpose” in “Passage to India”

“Passage to India” is a poem that expresses Whitman’s path to transcendence and spirituality and his understanding of “God’s purpose;” in this poem he is saying that there is really no separation, that somehow we are all united, connected, and that we all need to “sail the seas of God,” which should help us recognize our divinity. Take a look at these lines from part 2:

“Passage to India!

Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

…

The lands to be welded together.”

The poet is saying that Creation is a unitary domain, the universe is unitary, and nothing is separated from anything. By realizing that we are all linked to one another, we may experience divinity; we may finally understand that we are all divine, sacred, body and soul, as he sings in section 24 of “Song of  Myself”: “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from;” and it is the task of the poet to tell this to everybody, singing to the peoples in all lands that separation is an illusion, that we are all children of the same God, sons and daughters of the same Father, that we are all alike and deserve heaven’s mercy and love alike. As the poet became whatever and whoever he saw, as he sang in “There Was a Child Went Forth,” he would naturally consider them as divine as himself, as worthy of being a son of God as himself was. And he was able to make everything “vivid” as he sang them. What can be more reviving than someone who can “moisten the roots of all that has grown.”  (section 22, “Song of Myself”) or “seize” a “descending man, and raise him with resistless will” and resurrect him, and make him live again? Is it not a miracle? If one can give life to “all” that lives, he is giving his vital force, his life force to another being, in short, he is giving himself to others, he is entering the other being and filling this other being with life, because he states that “anything I have I bestow.” And “Behold! I do not give lectures, or a little charity; / When I give, I give myself.” (these last quotations are from section 40 of “Song of Myself”).

The same attitude can be seen in Drum-Taps, the book that contains the poems on the War of Secession, during which Whitman helped wounded soldiers, Northerners and Southerners alike, working as a nurseman in precarious hospitals around Washington D.C., spending any money he saved to buy food, pen, paper and cigarettes for the patients who were totally helpless waiting for treatment that the government would hardly care to give in an appropriate way. But the poet would not only sing individual dramas, he would be in them, as he lived them in his family, and in the life of the friends he made at the time and also the drama of the Nation, the dividing of the country and the eventual reconciliation after the “full four years of its duration.”[i]

The bard was aware of his work as the uniting voice of his people, the voice of those without a voice. He sang in section 22 of “Song of Myself”: “What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? / Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me-I stand indifferent.” He did not reject any aspect of humanity, as he said, in the same section: “I am not the poet of goodness only-I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.” He included all, the good things and the bad things, what came from heaven and what came from hell. He assumed his role as the bard/voice of his race, the human race, chanting the joys and sorrows of his comrades. How could he ever deny any of his brothers or sisters, if he was waiting to meet “The Lord”, “The great Camerado” (section 45, “Song of Myself”), who could never deny any part of his creation, and for whom he longed so much? Whitman would “reject none, accept all,” just like the Creator does, because the Whole can only be a complete whole if it includes all its parts, the good and the evil; that is how he expressed all the love he felt for all the people, acquaintances or strangers, but essentially human beings, like himself, for a Greater Good!

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[i] “Fratricide and Brotherly Love: Whitman and the Civil War“, M. Wynn Thomas. In The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1997, pg. 27.