Passage to India

For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval.

- Chapter 2, Verse 20, Bhagavad Gita

In his 1872 collection of Leaves of Grass, Whitman introduced one of his many poems with transcendental influence, “Passage to India”, in which he describes the completion of the physical journey to India through advancements such as the railroad system, steamships, and the Suez Canal, built in 1869. He praises these achievements and wishes for, "the lands to be welded together", increasing the connection between different countries and cultures. With this increase in communication and travel, Whitman sings of the new sights to be seen and ideas to be shared, "O you temples...you too I welcome and fully the same as the rest. You too with joy I sing."

Whitman continues his praise of innovation with the idea that these feats are only a prelude to the spiritual pathway to India, the East, and, ultimately, to God, as he welcomes not only the temples, but also the spirits inside, "The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams...You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest".

While he explores this theme with the physical body compared to the soul in his other works, for example "Song of Myself", in this piece he is rather comparing the concrete advancements of buildings and transportation to the journey that his soul will take with the new knowledge to which he will be exposed.

The transcendental belief that the temporary material body and the eternal spiritual soul are fundamentally distinct, is a refrain found in South Asian thought, for example in the classic Indian work of the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient text from the Mahabharata which provides a basis of the ideals of the astika system of Indian philosophy. In this poem, Whitman explores the idea of his soul carrying on after his mortal death. This idea can be found in the Samkhya school of thought. The Samkhya school assumes the existence of two bodies, a temporal body and a body of “subtle” matter that persists after biological death. When the former body has perished, the latter migrates to another temporal body.

While Whitman never travelled to India himself, his work certainly carries the spiritual load that ancient Indians bore so many years ago.

"A worship new I sing,

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,

You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,

You, not for trade or transportation only,

But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul."

- Walt Whitman, "Passage to India", Leaves of Grass

Sources

Books

Whitman, Walt, and Francis Murphy. Walt Whitman: the complete poems. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Eknath, Easwaran. The Bhagavad Gita. Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1985. Print.

Websites