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
Greek underworld name. Not much is known about her, but she is an ally of Zeus and lives in the underworld. Eurynomos is one of the daemons of the underworld, who eats off all the flesh of the corpses, leaving only their bones. In the Greek underworld, the souls of the dead still existed but they are insubstantial and they flitted around the underworld with no sense of purpose. The dead within the Homeric underworld lack "menos", or strength, and therefore they cannot influence those on earth. They also lack "phrenes", or wit, and are heedless of what goes on around them