A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
Komi mythology family. The land of the dead was usually thought to be far to the north of the living, beyond mountains, rivers and forests. The Komi equivalent of the Styx (the river of the underworld in Greek mythology) was "Syr Yu" (Сыр Ю), "River of Pitch". Dead souls were assigned various means of crossing the river, according to their sins in this world: an iron bridge, a shaky beam, a thin pole or a cobweb. After this the dead had to climb a huge slippery mountain. This was only possible if the person had led a good life and had strong