NINE

DONE WITH THE COMPASS

In a 1969 issue of Time, a magazine my father subscribed to, I found an article describing a new phenomenon: the Gay Liberation Front. The text was accompanied by a photograph of men sitting at a table, organizers giving out information. The one who caught my eye had dark, longish hair under a print bandanna, muttonchop sideburns, soulful eyes. His face hadn’t been obscured, he wasn’t in the shadows. He wasn’t hiding. Handsome as any of the men I admired on the street, in their artfully patched jeans and handmade belts and sandals, he looked like he lived in daylight; he looked like a person who had friends. I couldn’t formulate my thoughts about the image. I sat, with the magazine open on my lap, and looked, and hoped that no one would see me looking.

I was sixteen, and not until that moment had I seen an image of an out, confident gay man, one who seemed to live in happy concert with others. It must be difficult to imagine such a black-out of images or information, to conjure such invisibility and silence, if you didn’t live through it. If you are a reader too young for this period in American life to seem real to you, I take the fact that it seems unimaginable as a real sign of the progress of freedom in this world.

THERE ARE POETS who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—each straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalog particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other.

The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversized production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet.

The third edition of the 1860 edition included 146 new poems—a nearly unbelievable number! Some sixty-eight of these were written between the appearance of the second in 1856 and June of 1857 when the poet was clearly in a kind of creative fever, one that essentially did not subside until the 456-page third collection was headed for the press. This third volume was produced by a commercial publisher, and is indeed more traditional in design. Dropping the models of coffee-table book and portable testament, it looks more like most mid-nineteenth-century books of poems, with small line drawings and ornamental flourishes around the poems’ titles. The frontispiece presents the poet in an engraving taken from an oil portrait, Walt Whitman with lush but not yet prophetic locks and a stylish cravat, more Romantic spirit than one of the roughs. Somewhere between two thousand and five thousand copies were printed, and the book was largely well reviewed, and fared better in the marketplace than the earlier editions.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Whitman had abandoned his practice of expanding and rearranging his book. Why not write one collection, set it aside, and write another? This is one of the primary ways poets progress; looking at a book you’ve finished, you don’t want to pursue exactly that same path again. A new collection invites us to vary form and tone, try on a new stance, strike out in a new direction and thus view familiar territory from another vantage point. In truth, our obsessions, our ways of making meaning, even our signature vocabulary and syntax often stay remarkably close to where we began; if we’re lucky, we just get better at using them. But, as we move from book to book, serious attention to the matters at hand can help to widen the embrace of our work a bit, and just a bit can prove plenty. Suppose Whitman had decided to bring a thread that had been recessive in one book—the abject self-doubt he reveals in the chilling final section of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” for instance—and bring it more into the foreground in the next? What unexpected, potentially rich poems we might have had!

Or maybe not. I can see reasons why Whitman would have wanted to go on cultivating the singular field of “leaves” that comprised his book. In a way that is true of no other great poet, his poems were a tool to make something happen; the change he wished to effect, and sometimes believed he could, was more important to him than art. This is why he could later say he wished he’d been an orator instead, when he’d written at least two of the greatest poems in the language. Of course poets themselves don’t get to know if they have written anything that will last, but Whitman tells us, in no uncertain terms, that he will be read after his death, by men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence. I can confidently say that, had I written “Song of Myself” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I would not be wishing I’d chosen another career.

It’s in the 1860 edition that the poet first begins to arrange his poems in clusters, making thematic clumps, breaking one off here and adding another there. He would go on remixing the order for the rest of his life.

This was largely a mistake. It results, at the worst, in sections of poems about the sea, or winter, and this kind of organization inevitably diminishes the work. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” takes place on a beach, but it is not “about” the sea, because great poems are not “about” in this way; they are profound reaches into that “furnace of meaning,” and they use whatever is at hand—the sea, a ferryboat ride, an unruly field of grass—to get to where they need to go. The “subject” matters until the furnace is lit, and then the poem almost seems to burn its ostensible occasion clean away.

It may be that Whitman arranged and fiddled because he came to understand, over time, that he was losing the capacity to create the magnificent, visionary odes that had launched his career. He would suffer from poverty, and from anxiety over his reception and reputation; as an outsider who both wanted and did not want to be on the inside, he was in a position of near-constant instability. He saw the boys he adored, the ones he hoped might base a newly energized democratic order on their affection for each other, tear one another apart on the battlefield instead, in a war of mind-bending brutality. He wandered from bed to bed for five years in makeshift hospitals, in appalling conditions, offering what comfort and witness he could, and destabilized his own health in the process. He suffered a massive stroke and required help for the rest of his life. How could I expect him to go on writing great poems when he’d already created ones that no one had known how to write in the first place, poems that sail right past what we thought a poem could do?

ONE EXAMPLE OF SUCH A POEM (or poems, depending on how you think of it) is the lyric sequence “Calamus” of 1860—truly a sequence, since the order of the poems and the spaces between them create a larger sense of meaning and presence than any of the individual pieces, strong as they may be, could generate on their own.

The suite’s titled “Calamus” after a plant native to Long Island, a wetland dweller the poet described to William Michael Rossetti as growing about water-ponds in the valley . . . presenting the biggest & hardiest kind of spears of grass—and their fresh, aquatic, pungent bouquet. Some lines from an early notebook entry probably bring us closer to the plant’s charms:

Calamus sweet-green bulb and melons with bulbs grateful to the hand

I am a mystic in a trance exhalation

something wild and untamed—half savage

coarse things

Trickling Sap flows from the end of the manly tooth of delight . . .

We’ve encountered that boss-tooth before, bringing with it the spilling of liquor, rich recompense and trickling sap.

And indeed, the sequence begins

In paths untrodden,

in the growth by margins of pond waters

evoking some marshy retreat unvisited by casual wanderers, for in this secluded spot I can respond as I dare not elsewhere.

There is an old tradition, just how old it’s impossible to say, of men seeking sexual congress in the natural world, in settings known to an inner circle but not generally recognized. In the years I lived in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, and certainly for decades before me and in the decade since I’ve left, the secluded spot in question was the dunes and salt marsh at Herring Cove, which stretched all the way from the beach by that name around the narrowing spiral of the tip of the Cape, past Wood End Lighthouse and ending at Long Point Light. You never needed to walk that far. On a mild day in winter, men would be wandering in the dunes near the parking lot; in summer, they’d be roaming the edges of the great tidal flat sheltered by the arm of the dunes, in a marvelous shimmer of horizontals, bands of silver water and of beach grass interrupted by the sharp verticals of reeds. You could walk so far into the marsh there was little evidence of a distant road, or a lighthouse, only men naked or nearly so up to their ankles or thighs in warm water, the hunter-gatherers of pleasure. They were the celebrants of what Whitman here calls manly attachment, and athletic love. He is at pains to name what it is he celebrates, the secret of my nights and days . . .

If a poem could have gotten much more forthright in 1860, I don’t know how, but no one save men who shared the poet’s desires seemed to notice. A wider readership, to the extent Whitman had one, remained blind to the sexual content that seems to us to fairly ooze from the poems. The subject of male same-sex desire remained firmly unseeable.

It may have helped that the “Calamus” section in Whitman’s third edition is countered by a mirror double, a group of poems called “Enfans d’Adam.” Perhaps even that French title signals us that something is off; why does a poet who vigorously embraced demotic American speech need such window dressing? This sequence is an extended hymn to reproductive sex, and in the second poem of the sequence the speaker announces that he is

—singing the phallus,

Singing the song of procreation,

Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people,

Singing the muscular urge . . .

Some of Whitman’s readers, including a surprising number of women, cheered him on, while others shut the book in horror. Was this in fact what made Emily Dickinson give up on Leaves of Grass?

Whitman’s intent was for these poems to balance the Calamus poems by embodying the love of women and the joy of heterosexual coupling, but the result is strained. There’s even a nasty whiff of selective breeding in it, and ultimately of eugenics. The best of the group is the seventh poem, in which a lover (gender unnamed) addresses another (gender immaterial), in a fierce and uncompromising salutation to what is elemental in us. I don’t know that this poem gave rise to Thoreau’s comment about the crudity of Whitman’s sexuality (It is as if the beasts spoke, he sniffed), but I would be delighted if it were in fact a riposte to the uptight Thoreau; it’s a deep, full-throated celebration of two people becoming elemental together.

YOU and I—what the earth is, we are,

We two—how long we were fooled!

Now delicious, transmuted, swiftly we escape, as Nature escapes,

We are Nature—long have we been absent, but now we return,

We become plants, leaves, foliage, roots, bark,

We are bedded in the ground—we are rocks,

We are oaks—we grow in the openings side by side,

We browse—we are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as any,

We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,

We are what the locust blossoms are—we drop scent around the lanes, mornings and evenings,

We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,

We are what the flowing wet of the Tennessee is—we are two peaks of the Blue Mountains, rising up in Virginia,

We are two predatory hawks—we soar above and look down,

We are two resplendent suns—we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar—we are as two comets;

We prowl fanged and four-footed in the woods—we spring on prey;

We are two clouds, forenoons and afternoons, driving overhead,

We are seas mingling—we are two of those cheerful waves, rolling over each other, and interwetting each other,

We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,

We are snow, rain, cold, darkness—we are each product and influence of the globe,

We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again—we two have,

We have voided all but freedom, and all but our own joy.

If that is how the beasts sound when they speak, then I am ready to turn and live with them. The poem captures exactly the elemental, descending-to-earth feeling joyful sex can have, an experience that seems to encompass all others, to bring us into contact with many kinds of lives, to awaken us to all we are. My question about Dickinson a few paragraphs ago was a rhetorical one, but I’d like to answer it: Of course not. Enter into evidence this uncharacteristic poem, numbered in the archive of her untitled poems as 249, her own version of We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again:

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –

To a heart in port –

Done with the compass –

Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the sea!

Might I moor – Tonight –

In thee!

The first time I toured Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, I was with a small group guided by a docent, and we stopped near the end of our walk through the house (this was before one could enter the Evergreens, the magnificently untouched ghost-palace of Susan and Austin Dickinson next door) before a copy of this poem, printed on a placard on the wall. The docent talked about Dickinson’s reputation as the cracked spinster in her white dresses, lowering cookies to neighborhood children in a basket from a second-floor window, a perpetual virgin whispering to visitors from behind a door just a bit ajar, and then she read us this poem. What do you think? she asked us. Did Emily Dickinson ever experience sex? And she turned to the poem again, a smile spreading into her eyes.

There is something about Rowing in Eden – Ah, the sea! that arrives with the force of utter conviction, which is another form of the voice of experience. The aptness and freshness of the metaphor, the surprise of something it never occurred to me anyone did in Eden, and then that breathtaking opening out to the freedom and breadth of the sea—why do these fill me with certainty that Dickinson knows whereof she speaks? It thrills me that I don’t know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible—well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.

But in truth what I like best here, the lines I might want tattooed on my skin if ever I were to inscribe on myself words rather than the more ambiguous, less nailed-to-meanings image I bear now, are two lines of superb refusal: Done with the compass – /Done with the chart! We probably read them first as a sort of reiteration of the fact that the speaker’s no longer looking; she doesn’t care how the winds blow because she’s found her heart’s port, and needs no more go a-sailing. But that borders on the sentimental, and so this genius has supplied, inside these lines, a secondary sense. She has entered a zone in which maps no longer apply. Without compass or chart we enter into freedom: nothing but nothing is telling us where to go. The placement of that stressed syllable—Done—at the beginning of two lines in a row makes this sound like an outburst, a cry of liberation. She is not afraid of getting lost. With exasperation and joy, she throws away the pointers and directives. Done with the compass – /Done with the chart: I say it to myself, sometimes, as a rallying declaration of freedom. The final line of Whitman’s ecstatic hymn to lovemaking is entirely in accord here: We have voided all but freedom, and all but our own joy.

“Enfans d’Adam” fails to maintain the genuineness of this seventh section, or its sexy appeal. Some of the poems patronize women instead: To talk to the perfect girl who understands me—the girl of The States. Others continue to emphasize what Whitman elsewhere called the procreant urge of the world over pleasure or intimacy. The speaker sometimes becomes a sexual dynamo of divine proportions:

Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet . . . offering myself,

Bathing myself, bathing my songs in sex, Offspring of my loins.

I am no prude, in my reading life or elsewhere, but I find this embarrassing. I understand that it’s spoken by an avatar of male fertility, but have those loins really not been praised enough?

WHITMAN COULD NOT KEEP his mind on women, even for the duration of a few poems. Here’s a sampling of lines from the sequence intended to praise what the phrenologists called amativeness, the love between men and women:

—the sight of the perfect body,

The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back

Lying and floating . . .

And

I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men . . .

We know from early drafts of these that he changed some of his pronouns, moving poems from the “Calamus” cluster into this one. It seems surprising that his attempt to balance the homoerotic poems with these was so successful, but the performance was not without consequences: “Enfans d’Adam” was banned in Boston for years, and Whitman would later be fired from his government job because of his frank celebration of heterosexual pleasure.

“CALAMUS,” AN ASSEMBLAGE devoted to the praise of adhesiveness, the phrenological term for friendship, what the poet called athletic love, moves in mysterious ways. After opening with a sort of invocation, in which the poet resolves to sing no songs today but those of manly attachment, and promises to tell the secret of my nights and days, the second, mysterious poem turns out to be a hymn to death. It begins with an image of the hair on the speaker’s chest, his scented herbage, yielding leaves, the pages of his book. This image echoes an equation familiar from “Song of Myself”: body equals grass equals text, but now what grows are tomb-leaves. The poet who told us, a few years before, that there really is no such thing as death now seems to have moved into another relation to mortality; now he asks what indeed is beautiful, except Death and Love? He asserts that love and death are folded together above all, and that death may be the real reality, which will long outlive life. What are we to make of this somber, rather ceremonial poem, coming from the great celebrant of vitality?

Whitman has made a great movement in the direction of the abject, and I suspect he has placed this poem so early in his sequence of love poems because it is a sort of threshold. The speaker we met in “Song of Myself” cannot, by definition, be lonely, or depressed, because he contains within himself the multitudes, and is a voice speaking for all. From his vantage point no boundary exists between self and other; he shares in all vitality. His life is rooted in the continuously creative forces of being, the pour of something emerging from nothing, the endless recirculation of energy, matter, and language.

That vision has not vanished, exactly, but it has cooled, and the speaker has shrunk to a more recognizable human form; he is part of all the circles of being that surround him and intersect with his individual life, but he is no longer acutely conscious of being unbounded. He is, instead, one who loves, and who is capable of losing the one he loves, and who will himself disappear.

The speaker in “Song of Myself” loves everybody, and needs only comradeship, and in this way floats high above the ordinary human landscape of attachment. But the speaker in “Calamus” wants and needs the specific gravity of an anchoring other. He gives his heart—himself, as it were—to one man, and no such project of finding home in another person’s embrace comes without abjection, and terror, struggle, and disappointment. Whitman addresses death directly, at the end of this second section, in one of his wildly bold moves, and says you will last very long. Perhaps that’s what necessitates placing this section so early in the forty-five-poem sequence: is it the permanence of death that requires us to seek another sort of “death” first, losing and then finding the self again in the embrace of another?