The Sleepers (poem)

The poem was first published in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), but was re-titled and heavily revised several times throughout Whitman's life.

The poet visits children first, who are described as being still and breathing quietly; French considers them paralyzed, comatose, or dead.

Next, they come across various people who are suffering:[7] The wretched features of ennuyes, the white features of corpses, the livid faces ofdrunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists, The gash'd bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door'd rooms, the sacredidiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates ....This world is a hellish one, but the narrator soon moves on, focusing on loving groups sleeping before returning to miserable people, such as prisoners and murderers.

Shortly before this moment, the narrator feels sympathetic for the suffering of various humans, and he starts to find peace and view the world from a happier light.

Yet even this happiness is not complete, as the poet remembers miserable people, such as "the exile, the criminal that stood in the box/... the wasted or feeble person".

In the subsequent sections, the narrator sees death and destruction (in the form of a drowning swimmer, a shipwreck, George Washington's troops being killed at the Battle of Brooklyn) and beauty (as Washington bidding his troops goodbye and a beautiful Native American woman who visits the poet's mother).

[7] The poem ends on a happy note as the narrator views people in better health:[9] The call of the slave is one with the master's call, and the master salutes the slave, The felon steps forth from the prison, the insane becomes sane, the suffering of sick persons is reliev'd, The sweatings and fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is sound, the lungs of the consumptive are resumed, the poor distress'd head is free, The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and smoother than ever, Stiflings and passages open, the paralyzed become supple, The swell'd and convuls'd and congested awake to themselves in condition, They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night, and awake.

[13] The historian Alan Trachtenberg wrote that none of the original poems in Leaves of Grass had "so baffled and so intrigued readers" as "The Sleepers.

"[4] The scholar Michael Rainer called it "perhaps the most startling and modern of the untitled poems" in the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

[15] In the poem, a large, strong black whale is used as a symbol that represents "the destructive power of American slaves in revolt against white society.

That black and lethargic mass, my sportsmen, dull and sleepy as it seems, hold the lightning and the taps of thunder.

He is slow—O, ong and long and slow and slow—but when he does move, his lightest touch is deathIn the metaphor, the "sportsmen" are white people.

I hate him that oppresses me, I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.Lucifer may refer to several different things or people; in 1956, Sholom J. Kahn speculated he may have been a slave trader.