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
The Union of Earth and Water had been in the Chigi Collection in Rome from which it was acquired by the Hermitage Museum between 1798 and 1800. The Union of Earth and Water The Union of Earth and Water is a Baroque painting by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing Cybele as the personification of earth holding the horn of plenty and Neptune as the personification of water in the center. A smaller copy of the painting made in the Rubens' workshop was owned by the Russian businessman Vladimir Logvinenko. Following the abolition of a thirty per cent import duty on artworks in 2004, Logvinenko brought