To Think Of Time - Analysis

The poem’s central wager: time doesn’t erase you

Whitman starts from a thought most people try not to hold for long: time—of all that retrospection! The opening questions are bluntly personal—Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?—and they name a fear that isn’t just of dying, but of becoming irrelevant, of the future being nothing to you. The poem’s driving claim is that this fear comes from a mistaken picture of reality. If we call the future nothing, Whitman argues, we also have to call the past nothing—they are just as surely nothing—and that collapses the whole lived world into meaninglessness. Against that collapse, he keeps insisting on continuity: the sun rose, people were flexible, real, alive, and even if we weren’t there to witness earlier ages, we are now here, and bear our part. Time, in this view, doesn’t cancel participation; it relocates it.

Birth and the body: the accouchement beside the corpse

Section 2 is where Whitman forces the thought into the room with us. He pairs two facts that never stop happening: without an accouchement and without a corpse. The language is medical and domestic at once—camphor-smell, unused medicines, the doctor’s silent and terrible look. The dying is touched: The faithful hand stays; twitching lips press a forehead; then The breath ceases. This is not a philosophical abstraction; it’s a scene of exact sensory weight, capped by the line It is palpable as the living are palpable. And then Whitman introduces a second kind of witnessing: without eye-sight lingers a different living, looking curiously on the corpse. The tension sharpens here: the poem honors the undeniable finality of the body while hinting, almost stubbornly, at some surplus of life that is not reducible to what the eyes can verify.

Indifference as the nightmare: rivers, houses, burial lines

When Whitman says, To think the thought of Death, merged in the thought of materials! he’s pointing to a particular modern dread: not just that we die, but that matter goes on without caring. He imagines rivers still flowing, snow still falling, fruits still ripening, yet not act upon us. The phrase that keeps returning is taking great interest—others will marvel at city and country while we taking no interest. Even the most ordinary ambition becomes tragic when set against that imagined indifference: To think how eager we are in building our houses! and then, soon enough, others are just as eager and we are quite indifferent. The image of Slow-moving and black lines creeping over the earth—the burial lines—turns death into an unstoppable infrastructure, something like a dark transportation system that reaches everyone, from presidents to the unnamed. The contradiction is the poem’s engine: Whitman makes the world feel achingly vivid, and then he stages the horror of being cut off from it.

A workman’s funeral: the insult of a finished life

Section 4 brings death down from cosmic scale into a particular working life, and the detail is almost journalistic: ferry-wharf, half-frozen mud, gray, discouraged sky, the short, last daylight of Twelfth-month. The dead man is an old Broadway stage-driver, and the ritual is spare: the coffin is lowered, the whip is laid on the coffin, earth is swiftly shovel’d in, then silence. The line He is decently put away—is there anything more? is deliberately brutal. It asks whether the sum of a person can be reduced to competent burial and a brief character sketch: free-mouth’d, quick-temper’d, fond of women, drank hearty, died at forty-one years. Whitman then lists the trade’s tactile life—apron, cape, gloves, the strap, the hostler, the grind of good day’s work, bad day’s work—and hits the same nerve again: he there takes no interest in them! The poem’s grief is not only that the man is gone, but that the world of his days continues as if he were never its center.

The hinge: from fear of nothing to the claim of strict account

The poem turns when Whitman stops treating indifference as the last word. In section 6 he makes a strange, almost audacious calm: What will be, will be well—for what is, is well. He refuses the easy escape of calling daily life a mirage; he insists markets and wages are not phantasms, that sin and goodness are no delusion. Then he pivots to identity as something gathered, not scattered: You are not thrown to the winds—you gather certainly and safely around yourself, climaxing in the chant Yourself! Yourself! Yourself! Sections 7 and 8 widen that reassurance into a moral physics: the threads and pattern, the orchestra tuned, the guest finally housed. The repeated law becomes Whitman’s counter-image to burial lines: not a line that ends you, but a rule of promotion and transformation that no one can elude. Even the poem’s huge democratic catalogue—Northerner, Southerner, people across the Atlantic and Pacific, immigrant hospital, lowest prostitute—serves one purpose: to argue there is strict account of all. Nothing and no one falls out of the ledger of being.

A sharper question the poem forces: what if death is betrayal?

Whitman briefly allows the opposite possibility to show how unbearable it is. If we end as ashes of dung, if maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! because we are betray’d. The word betray’d is telling: it implies the universe has been making promises—through beauty, coherence, desire, kinship—that would be false if annihilation were the final truth. The poem’s gamble is that our deepest sense of meaning is not sentimental noise but evidence.

Walking into the unknown: perfection without exceptions

In sections 9–11 Whitman answers his own challenge by describing how one lives if one truly does not suspect death. He claims he can walk pleasantly and well-suited only because the direction, though undefined, is good, and because The whole universe indicates it. The praise of animals—How beautiful and perfect—and the insistence that even what is called bad is just as perfect are not naive optimism so much as an attempt to see the world as an unbroken process: minerals, vegetables, imponderable fluids, all slowly and surely passing on. The ending oath is the poem’s final, most vulnerable assertion: everything without exception has an eternal Soul, and there is nothing but immortality. Having taken us through the camphor room, the frozen streets, the whip on the coffin, and the creeping burial lines, Whitman refuses to let those be proofs of nothingness. He turns them into the pressure that makes his conclusion necessary: if life is this palpable, this various, this strictly accounted for, then time cannot be a machine that simply deletes.