Walt Whitman pictures time as an immense ocean, and this poem is a handful of its spray—shells, weeds, and drift blown inland. Those tiny, spiraled shells, cold and silent, seem to hold a secret. Pressed to the temples, they murmur faint, far-off music, echoes of eternity carried from the “rim” of Atlantis to the Soul of the Prairies. The speaker feels he is giving everything—not just his own years, but all lives—in the form of songs washed up like waifs on America’s shores.
Then the tone darkens slightly. The currents that shape a new continent are tender, pensive waves, but they also rise ominous from the deep, wreckage and broken sails riding storm-tossed swells. The mood is one of awe before the mystery of origins, a blend of exaltation and a quiet recognition that death’s waves are part of the same vast, ongoing fusion of sea and land.