Throughout the tone of the piece there is loneliness, but the symbols used by Ginsberg present possible redemption. In particular, the individual the speaker encounters during his walk is Walt Whitman, whose presence also implies a truer world and the search for an identity in nature. In contemporary America there is a lack of individuality and this implies that Whitman knows the answers to the questions he asks. At the end of the poem he calls Whitman a “lonely old teacher of courage who… stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe” (XX) making him seem like a hero. Whitman standing on the rivers of the underworld exemplifies how America is forgetting what was known and how America is losing touch with the past. The only solution that combats the supermarket is in Whitman's vision of America, where there could have been an “America of love,” where there was more emphasis on love rather than consumerism. Although Ginsberg does not explicitly state that there is a better America, he emphasizes that the way to get there is through art and poetry, as Whitman did in his