As They Draw To A Close - Analysis

The poem’s closing claim: the work was always meant to train us for death

Whitman frames this poem as a kind of last accounting: as the precedent songs end, he tells us what has been under them all along. The central claim is that his earlier poems were not simply celebrations of life; they were a long preparation for a final act of faith in the one thing that seems to cancel every celebration: death. He names his long project as a seed he has tried to plant, and the harvest of that seed, here at the close, is a public vow: to place on record faith in death. The poem reads like a will written in plain sight—less a goodbye than a statement of what the whole enterprise has been for.

The tone is both tender and declarative. It has the warmth of someone looking back on sweet joy and the firmness of someone deciding to say the difficult thing plainly, without apology.

The hinge: from sweet joy to O death!

The poem turns sharply at Of you, O mystery great! Up to that moment, Whitman’s list keeps circling the living materials of a writer’s life: many an aspiration, many a dream and plan, years of joy. Then the focus snaps to the address that changes everything: O death! The shift matters because it refuses the usual bargain where joy and death are opposites. Whitman won’t treat death as the spoiler at the edge of the poem; he treats it as the hidden partner of the entire sequence. The earlier joys don’t get denied, but they get reinterpreted as part of a larger training in trust.

That hinge is also emotional: the poem moves from reminiscence into invocation. Death becomes not an event but a presence he can speak to—O mystery—as if the final lesson of his poems is learning how to address what cannot be explained.

For them…In them my work is done: the paradox of finishing by dissolving

One of the poem’s strongest tensions is between completion and continuation. Whitman declares, In them my work is done, with the emphasis doubled by the parenthetical insistence For them—for them have I lived. It sounds final, even sealed. Yet what he says he wants to do next is not to close things down but to compact what has been separated: ye parted, diverse lives. Finishing, for him, means enlarging the circle so the boundaries that made lives feel separate start to loosen.

That contradiction—ending by unbinding—fits the poem’s faith in death. If death is the mystery he trusts, then it is not merely an ending; it is a force that can gather what life scattered. The poem’s quiet daring is that it treats death as an agent of connection rather than erasure.

Rapport as his real ambition: mountains and winds joining the human soul

Whitman names a specific ambition that reaches beyond personal legacy: To put rapport between the natural world and you, O soul of man. The phrase is strikingly practical—almost like a technical goal—yet the materials are immense: mountains, rocks, streams, the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and pine. This isn’t just scenery; it’s a catalogue of durable, indifferent, nonhuman presences. By setting them in a sentence with the human soul, Whitman implies that the soul’s isolation is a mistake of perception. Rapport is what the poems have been trying to build: a felt correspondence between inner life and the world’s large physical facts.

Notice how the natural list leans into solidity and scale—rocks, mountains, forests—while the soul is addressed as something intimate and singular. The poem wants those registers to touch. In that light, faith in death becomes the final bridge: the condition in which the human stops insisting on separateness and rejoins the larger order.

A sharpened question hiding inside the vow

When Whitman says he wants to compact diverse lives, he makes unity sound like a kind of compression. Is that comfort, or is it a threat? The poem asks us to consider whether the peace he offers—rapport with rocks and winds—requires giving up the sharp edges of a self that wants to stay distinct.

Closing insight: the seed he planted is a posture toward the inevitable

By the end, the poem leaves the impression that Whitman’s real subject has been a posture: not courage as bravado, but trust as an act of record. The seed he planted across the earlier songs is the ability to say O death! without flinching, and to imagine that what feels like an ending might also be the great organizer—linking parted lives, and bringing the human soul into rapport with the oldest, most impersonal realities of the earth.