Whitman’s “The Sleepers” and the Paradox of Waking Dreams

 I want to run with a thought that Meg raised in our last discussion and see where it leads. She suggested that Whitman’s description of the narrator “[b]ending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers” tugs on the Transcendentalist thread of awakening the masses through poetry. The paradox that we couldn’t quite unravel in discussion is roughly as follows.

In “The Sleepers,” Whitman’s narrator achieves a state of enlightenment through sleep. The slumbering society that he observes has achieved a state of equality and innocence that represents his epiphanic vision. On the one hand, this seems to reinforce Emerson’s notion that the poet “stands among partial men for the complete man.” On the other, Whitman’s narrator does not awaken any of the sleepers, as Emerson’s vision of the poet would require. If the poetic persona in “The Sleepers” is to achieve the Transcendentalist goal of waking the masses, he/she will do so by inviting the reader to imagine the egalitarian vision witnessed in a dream as the principle to live by in the waking hours.

Dreams can be seen as either illusions or as prophecies. “The Sleepers” can be read as either, though as a Transcendentalist text it aspires to be prophetic.

If the poem is a prophetic dream, its omens are not eminently hopeful. The “beautiful gigantic swimmer” (who could be the nation or the writer trying to save the nation, or both–likely both) gets dashed against the rocks, Washington kisses his troops goodbye in a scene that predates national independence, a Native woman appears and disappears, and a slave warns, “I hate him thatoppresses me, / I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.” What follows is a reverse chronology, almost as if American history is being rewound, as all of the immigrants return to their native lands, and “[t]o every port of England and France and Spain enter wellfilled ships.” The poem begins to reconcile opposites at this point, until all “are averaged…one [being] no better than the other,” and the narrative concludes with rhapsodic language about darkness as both mother and lover, giving birth and giving death in a conceptual loop that finds solace (if it does) in both the beginning and end of things.

For a nation scarcely eighty years old at the time of the poem’s publication, Whitman’s vision is sobering. His reverse chronology suggests that the racial and political conflicts he faced in 1855 might best be resolved by unraveling the social fabric that created them: turning back the clock to a precolonial time. The egalitarian vision that his narrator enjoys is charming while it invites a panoramic view of the sleeping nation, but alarming when it suggests the relationship between sleep and death. “The sleepers,” Whitman writes, “are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, / They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed.” This is the introduction to another sequence of reconciled opposites, which include racial opponents, fathers and sons, teachers and scholars, and so on, who “flow and unite” as corpses.

Whitman’s vision is far more complex than Bryant’s notion of Earth as the “great tomb of man.” There are meditations in “The Sleepers,” but they are surrealistic, and the metaphorical relationship between sleep and death is suspended long enough to create an ironic conclusion. Whitman’s rhythmic and lyrical innovations are less predictable than Bryant’s stylistic formalism, anticipating many of the artistic conventions that would characterize Modernism. Yet, despite the fact that the narrator of “The Sleepers” is dreaming, his/her vision also achieves the epic scope that Emerson envisioned for the artist (albeit not quite in the fashion that Whitman delivers).

In the final image of returning to night and death, Whitman “apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth,” as Emerson would have it. The irony is that the commonwealth (as Melville’s narrator finally understood) is death: the decline and fall of nations, the historical unraveling of conquest, the ruin of the City upon the Hill.