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 Moon is made of green cheese cheese" in this proverb simply refers to a young cheese (sometimes "cream cheese" is used), though modern people may interpret the color reference literally. There was never an actual historical popular belief that the Moon is made of green cheese ("cf.", Flat Earth and the myth of the Flat Earth). It was typically used as an example of extreme credulity, a meaning that was clear and commonly understood as early as 1638. There exists a family of stories in comparative mythology in diverse countries that concern a simpleton who sees a reflection of the Moon and mistakes it for a