Whitman's and Dickinson's poems convey a connection between sexual and spiritual ecstasies. Dickinson's #249 uses suggestive sexual language along with an interpretation of divine love to reveal her private, obscure vision of life. Her structural and synthetic choices add feelings to her poems, her use of symbolism lures the reader into them. Whitman's communion with life's experience depends on physical contact. The body is the vessel that enables the soul to experience the world both spiritually and sexually.
             As Whitman melts away into the abstract "Myself", the section (45) explores the possibilities for connection between individuals' sexual and spiritual experiences. In the opening stanzas the speaker, portrayed as a young individual, is receiving "soft balsamic busses [all over] [his] body". He fully enjoys his youth, experiencing the best of sexual thrill. Referring back to another piece(6): a child asks the narrator "What is the grass?". The narrator is forced to explore his own use of symbolism and his inability to break things down to essential principles. The bunches of grass in the child's hands become a symbol of regeneration. This regeneration returns with the concluding stanza of section 45 when the speaker must "come on perfect terms" with his nature and ultimately go to heaven. The lavish eroticism reinforces this idea: sexual contact allows two people to become one. It offers a moment of transcendence. "The great Camerado" is speaker's life experience personified as a companion, it will await him in heaven.
             Dickinson's #249 has a pronoun ambiguity. It becomes difficult to tell to whom thee/Thee refers or if there are two different antecedents. The first stanza hardly seems to suggest divine love, but "Rowing in Eden-Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor-Tonight-In Thee!", certainly reads as comfort in spirituality....