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How sweet the silent backward tracings!
The wanderings as in dreams the meditation of old times re-
sumed their loves, joys, persons, voyages.
Whitman discusses in this very short poem the wonderfulness of tracing back through memories of all kinds. He states that the backwards experiences (reliving the memories) are silent because they are experienced within one’s own mind, unless specifically spoken aloud with another, but they are all sweet to remember. He describes them as “dreams” because they are simply images replayed as the mind captures them; no memory can ever be lived again because it happened in the past. He finalizes the poem with the different aspects/types of memories that can be experienced – love, joy, people, travels, as well as many other types of memories that he must have left out. Others may include, but are not limited to, sorrow, death, trauma, etc. Whitman decidedly takes the much more positive approach to recapturing memories.