Leaves of Grass

In the second edition in 1856 this poem was called “Night Poem.” Whitman changed the title again, to “Sleep Chasings,” in 1860 and finally to “The Sleepers” in 1871. The poem also underwent considerable revision. Most notably, Whitman deleted 11 lines (Lines 60-70) that appeared in the first edition. In the first seven of those lines the speaker expresses shame at being thrust outside naked. This may be connected to the previous lines which describe a woman’s sexual encounter with the darkness. The last four lines of the passage that was deleted also depict a symbolic sexual act—either between a man and a woman or between two men—that ends in a peaceful or celebratory afterglow:

The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking,

Laps life-swelling yolks . . . . laps ear of rose-corn, milky

and just ripened:

The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness,

And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching the glass,

and the best liquor afterward (Lines 67-70).

Whitman may have felt that these lines were too explicitly sexual; the deletion provides for a smoother transition from, “I follow . . fade away” (Line 59), to, “I descend my western course” (Line 71).

In the poem, the whole range of life is reflected in the sleepers, who are often opposites. The speaker encounters those in solitary desperation or engaged in dysfunctional pleasure-seeking like alcohol or masturbation: “wretched features of ennuyees, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists” (Line 8). But these are followed by the peaceful images of a married couple with one hand on the hip of the other, and sisters sleeping lovingly side by side. All sleepers, whether troubled or serene, are all enfolded in the night. This contrast resumes toward the end of the poem, which once more emphasizes the unity of humanity despite its many different physical and emotional conditions, from the “affectionate boy, the husband and wife” (Line 153) to the “stammerer, the sick, the perfectformed, the homely” (Line 155), and “the laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight shadow, the red squaw, / The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wronged” (Lines 157-58). The speaker juxtaposes the socially approved of with those whom illness has marginalized (“the consumptive” has tuberculosis, “the erysipalite” is someone with a bacterial skin infection, and “the idiot” is a now outdated and offensive term for someone with intellectual disability).

The surrealistic imagery often disrupts narrative flow, but the speaker is following the logic of dreams, which jump from one image or scene to another without connective tissue (like when the speaker suddenly becomes the “terrible heir” of Lucifer [Line 127]). Instead of plot coherence, order is created via the central symbol of the all-embracing, healing, and transformative night, which is an image of rebirth. All the sleepers, without exception, are part of the invisible, beneficent purposes of life. Night nourishes all in her charge: “O my mother” the speaker calls to it (Line 202). The sleepers only have to wait as the steadfast purpose of the universe, in which everything is “duly in order . . . . every thing is in its place” (Line 173) works on them and makes them “beautiful [...] in the dim night” (Line 163). Eventually, everyone who was enfolded in the night becomes equal, no longer marked by affliction or disfigurement: “I swear they are averaged now . . . . one is no better than the other, / The night and sleep have likened them and restored them” (Lines 160-61).