Now the “perpetual journey” that Whitman has taken us on through this poem—a journey that has extended to the vastest regions of the cosmos, from the origins of the universe billions of years ago to billions of years hence, a journey of a dynamic shifting life force that can never be measured—suddenly shrinks again to the seemingly smaller yet equally mysterious journeys of the poet and the reader. Once again embracing the “you” who reads the poem, the “I” leads us to a “knoll,” where we gain a perspective above all the knowledge that libraries hold, above religions and philosophies, and the poet points us to “the public road” that we each must travel for ourselves. This is Whitman’s “open road,” the journey with no end, the journey that exceeds all the maps and guides of past knowledge and faith, the journey we always make “publicly,” as an organic part of the world around us (given all that Whitman has demonstrated about our shared atoms, how could the journey ever really be private?). Whitman’s imagery makes the journey feel familiar and even routine: it’s a road we’ve been on before, maybe our whole lives; it is right there “within reach”; and we will travel it both alone and with the poet, who offers us support even as he begins now to release us from his tutelage.

Whitman moves once more to the astronomical immensity he has evoked so many times before and imagines a self that is insatiable for more experience, a self that could encompass the cosmos and still want to expand beyond it. As the poet is to his spirit, so are we to him: we are his spirit now contained in the living bodies of the present. The poet begins to remind us, as he will repeatedly in these final sections of the poem, that he is, after all, dead, and we are alive. But we’ve come this far together—dead poet and living reader—and he will be buried as a living presence in these leaves we are reading for as long as we read them, as long as we return to them and (like the child in Section 6) ask what they mean. The poet will be there for support (we can rest the “chuff” of our hand on his hip, just as we rest the heel of our hand on his book): he is emerging forever from this poem, just as we feel ourselves emerging into a new consciousness as we read it, intensely more aware of the present moment that Whitman knew we would someday inhabit.

Preparing us for our life’s journey, Whitman offers the comforting images of “biscuits to eat” and “milk to drink,” but we realize that the sustenance he is actually giving us is this poem itself, the words on the page, which have, over the past forty-six sections, truly awakened us, “washed the gum” from our eyes and made us cognizant of the “dazzle” and the mystery and the poetry “of every moment” of our lives. Now, perhaps, we are ready to become “a bold swimmer,” and, as the poem comes to an end, to let go of the supports the poet has given us as we immerse ourselves in the sea of our heightened present experience.