There is a network of interconnections in Leaves of Grass around the word calamus, or reed. It points to several myths, meanings and details that lead us to many directions; however, they are all related in some way to this plant. It is as though the reed were a tree with various branches. We shall seek here to try and follow these branches to find the flowers and fruits they might give us. First, it is necessary to go back in time to the account of the myth of calamus (or kalamos, in Greek), which will take us to the Greek mythological figure that bears this name:
Calamus, the son of the river-god Meander, his name means ‘reed’. He was in love with a youth named Carpus [Karpos, in Greek]. One day they were both bathing in the Meander and Calamus wanted to show his friend that he was the better swimmer, but in the competition that ensued Carpus was drowned. In his grief Calamus withered to such extent that he became a reed by the river bank. (GRIMAL, 1991, p.80)
From the start, we have an allusion both to male love and antiquity, that is, to a mythological past, the past that Whitman did not want to “repel”, as he stated in the first sentence of his Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. We can see in this very brief record of the myth the summary of what the poet wanted to express by the “Calamus” cluster: manly attachment, comradeship, “unphysical” or disembodied love between men, union, nationality. Certainly the title of this cluster was not chosen at random, for Whitman was an expert on inventing titles for poems and books. As indicated by the manly attachment of the myth, the “Calamus” poems are widely recognized as homage to male love, as is stated by Canby (1943, p.176) in his Walt Whitman, An American, “A Study in Biography” of the America bard:
In 1860, the central theme is love – between the sexes in Children of Adam, and the love of male comrades in Calamus. It was the centrality of a love which was sexual as well as spiritual, that Walt could not successfully explain to Emerson, and so kept silent.
For example, in “Calamus”, Whitman sings how the attraction from man to man can be acknowledged as the real love that will unite the nation. His best known poem on this subject is “For You O Democracy”, whose first stanza presents the “life-long love of comrades” as the foundation of the indissolubility of the future continent:
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
The poet sings that everything will be done with and by “manly love”, especially to serve Democracy, the mother of all the children of the nation. These are the children who will be employed later, in the American Civil War (1861-1865), to protect the Union fighting against the Confederate States of America, the eleven Southern slave states, which did not agree with the Union politics of preventing the expansion of slavery into new territories of the United States and decided to secede. The fact is that Whitman was against slavery, but he was in favor of the unity of the country and of the Constitution, which is similar to the position withheld by the Union. Even though he suffered a lot and did what he could to help relieve Northern and Southern soldiers’ suffering, he knew that, given the political and economic situation of the United States[1], the only possible solution to maintain the union as such was the war. His love for his country as a unity made him support the leader of the nation, Abraham Lincoln[2], whom he admired personally. This attitude is coherent with what he had sung in his belief in inseparability. Later, during the war, while in daily contact with soldiers, he verified that what he had written was true, for what he had felt about his countrymen before, that they were comrades capable of love and friendship and of a magnetic energy that “will make divine […] lands”, was something real. When he was close to them, those simple affectionate people, who were the basis of the nation, lived up to his expectations. For these simple men were also capable of heroic deeds, of giving their lives to maintain the union of their homeland, even though there were those for whom North-America was a forced or new homeland (African Americans and immigrants). Whitman recorded this deep human experience in Drum-Taps (1865), “Sequel” to Drum-Taps (1866) and Specimen Days and Collect, published in 1882-3 by Rees Welsh and Co., and later included in his Complete Prose Works, 1892, published by David Mckay. As written above in section 2.1, the “Sequel” is the supplement that contains the poet’s meditation on the death of Abraham Lincoln, his “Memories of President Lincoln”. There are other poems as well in this edition, such as “O Captain! My Captain!”, a beautiful and sad lament because the captain “does not answer” any more; “Hushed Be the Camps Today”, the quiet song of the poet on the “dear commander’s death”, speaking for those who were silent; and “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”, the poem that he was asked to sing by a “Phantom gigantic superb” that said to him:
Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America, chant me the carol of victory,
And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet,
And sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.469)
Here is the poet singing Democracy, comradeship, heroism, but never forgetting the pain that was in everybody’s soul and in many people’s bodies. This is why we mentioned unphysical love. Whitman was describing a type of love that is beyond pure physical love, or sex. He was talking about something greater, something that continues after the death of the physical bodies, or something one feels for their homeland, their country, because while the country does have a concrete existence, it also exists as a mental concept and a sentiment. They are all related to create the sense of being, the spirit of the nation. And this is beyond bodily attraction. In this sense, the myth of Calamus illustrates this type of love, because their love remains in a different form.
In this manner, Whitman sings a complex form of love that goes beyond homo-erotic sex, although it might include that: the myth tells the story of two youths that end up dying. One is called Carpus (the fruit of the vegetation) and the other becomes a reed, which is a kind of tall grass. The myth tells us that when the two young men die, they continue to live in new and different bodies, but as transformed parts of nature that can live near each other. That signifies that the poet is depicting a kind of love that transcends the physical bodies and even a form of life. It is really a metamorphosis, a transformation, but a natural one, as it happens when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, a process which is common in nature and is assimilated into ancient mythology[3]. Which means that this kind of love the poet is portraying is long lasting, not to say eternal, and also that our spirits are undying, and may continue living in a different way.
A scene from “These I Singing in Spring”, from “Calamus”, might be helpful to clarify this point, for in this passage the poet at first thinks that he is alone, but some unexpected visitors show up:
Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,
Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them,
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever is near me,
Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,
Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus- root shall,
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!) (WHITMAN, 1996, p.272-3)
In parenthesis we can see the reference to the scene of Calamus and Carpus, where the poet plays the part of Calamus, walking in the water, recollecting the one who loved him, who now returns never to separate from him in spirit, for the crowd that appeared to accompany him is a crowd of spirits of beloved companions. This poem also presents some elements or symbols that will appear later in the poem mentioned before, the “Lincoln elegy”: the lilac, the pine, the one he loves, nature, dead persons, memory of dear comrades. Allen (1955, pp.329-30) sometimes comments on the poet in his biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer, that he is many times prophesying. Amazing as it may seem, it is a fact that many items that appeared in the 1860 edition in “Calamus” and “Children of Adam” naturally become part of the elegy on Lincoln’s death.[4] The time, the weather and nature before the assassination of the President were unusually strange. The evening star was brighter than before, the lilacs were blooming everywhere, the sky was clear, but there was a terrible rush at the White House on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, and Whitman reported that after that, when the President came out of the Capitol portico, there was only one cloud in the sky hovering over the President. The poet was deeply touched by these events. When the one he loved so much was assassinated, his dear comrade, all these elements that were fluttering in his soul were poured into the poems. This shows how the poet is integrated into his surroundings, or environment, living his life and absorbing the life that is taking place around him, in order to put them together in his poetry. We will discuss about this a little more below, where we mention other poets that were able to fuse individual interest with collective action.
Another poem from “Calamus” that deals specifically with the theme of comradeship and love from person to person as the linking element that will sustain the nation, that is, a personal sentiment with a political significance, is “The Base of All Metaphysics”:
[…]
Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.275)
This “dear love” is also what maintains the “city of Friends”, the “city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth”, the city that is the poet’s dream seen “in a dream” (“I Dream’d in a Dream”, from “Calamus”; WHITMAN, 1996, p.284). In short, the poet was always seeking those whose blood was like his, someone who could become his “eleve”[5] (pupil, student), to learn this kind of love, his capacity to love all, unconditionally. This is what is amazing in Whitman, this broad heart of his, with an ocean of love ready to pour forth as he sings in “Recorders Ages Hence” from “Calamus” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.276). This is his strength, his all-embracing human warmth, showing affection towards everybody and every body, low people, prisoners, soldiers, men, and women, as in “O woman I love! O bride! O wife!”[6]. As he sings in “From Pent-up Aching Rivers”, from “Children of Adam”:
Singing the song of procreation,
Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people, Singing the muscular urge and the blending,
Singing the bedfellow’s song, (O resistless yearning!
O for any and each the body correlative attracting!
O for you whoever you are your correlative body!
We can trace the movement of his love, and we can see that it goes from a personal level, in which he speaks of love between comrades, then of friends, from friends to families, and crowds, cities, lands, nations, until it reaches a spiritual level, as at the end of “I Sing the Body Electric”, in which he describes the beauty of bodies and of each part of the bodies, to finally summarize all these bodily expressions in “I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.258). And even then he goes further, for he raises his song to a religious level, for he is the “immortal […] chanter of Adamic songs”, which are bathed “in Sex”[7]. Again, he performs this interpenetration of dimensions, as he asks of his own “children” to interpenetrate with others, the children that he impregnated on women, who are to be “the best-beloved of [him] and America”. He becomes a myth, Adam, re-incarnated and a man, the poet who is singing the songs. He is an archetypal father (like his dear comrade Lincoln) and the man who is on earth singing his days and the life of his land, that is, the present, as he does in “Passage to India” (WHTIMAN, 1996, p.531). He sings a “simple separate person”, yet he sings the democratic “En-Masse”[8]. The first lines of “Song of Myself” describe this whitmanian capacity to synthesize the private and the public, the individual and the community, the physical and the spiritual, body and soul, in a single act of love for all: “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”.
This broad gesture of Whitman’s reminds us of other artists who incarnated this same spirit, such as Oswald de Andrade[9], in his “Cântico dos Cânticos Para Flauta e Violão” (“Song of Songs to Flute and Guitar”), in which he abolishes the frontier between individual love and collective love, for he sings his love for his beloved Maria Antonieta d’Alkmin inextricably mingled with his love for humanity, who was at that moment celebrating the victory of Liberty during World War II (ANDRADE, 1991, pp.55-65). His love for one person or for a woman is not separated from his love for all. This is where the personal sphere is linked to the collective sphere, where the specimen meets the species, or is not afraid to surrender to it; by understanding that only as a part of it can he actually exist, for a part can not be greater or larger than the whole. In modern times, this can be said to be the limit of selfishness and the beginning of selflessness, or what we might define as a personal interest surrendering to a collective interest, which becomes stronger by this act, being also a transmutation and integration of the person into his human group. This is the democratic aim of the poet, which shows the common interest of the whole overcoming the egotistical interest of only one part of it. The fact is that artists, and especially great artists, are able to fuse, to blend, to commingle their personal lives with the collective life of the community they represent.
Haroldo de Campos, in “Lirismo e Participação” (“Lyricism and Participation”; 1992, pp.89-96), describes this blending of the “two spheres”, the personal and the collective, not only in the themes addressed by the artists, but also in the language used by them. He cites Vladímir Maiakóvski, the Russian-Soviet poet (in his poem “Letter to Tatiana Iácovleva”), Oswald de Andrade (in his poem “Song of Songs”), and Alain Resnais, the French film-maker (in his film “Hiroshima”), as examples of artists who were able to mix the two sides of a person’s life into one single motif: love, by which we mean individual love mixed with collective love, to show that one is not separated from the other, and both are different forms of the same feeling.
[1] We will print as an annex to this work a document called “Origins of Attempted Secession” (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.1018-24; included in “Specimen Days and Collect”), in which Whitman offers his historical, political and economic analysis of the circumstances that led to the American Civil War, where he shows that both North and South were responsible for the fratricidal events that tore the country.
[2] Lincoln (1809-1865) was from Kentucky, which was considered frontier land at the time. He was born from uneducated anti-slavery farming parents. However, he was an avid reader, and self-taught law, which he began to practice in 1837, though having had only eighteen months of formal education. At the same time, he developed his writing and continued his political career, which he had begun in 1832. In 1844, he entered the Republican Party, and was nominated in 1860 for the Presidency, which he won. His main attributes were: being a “western” man, which made him gain support from frontier states and his anti-slavery view, which was not too extremist. In 1864, he was re-elected, for his commitment to winning the war. The fact is that Lincoln’s background fits Whitman’s ideal of a political leader, someone who would come from the multitude of common men.
[3] The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid [ Publius Ovidius Naso. 43 b.c.-a.d. 17.] is a poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world in terms according to Greek and Roman points of view. Probably written in 8 BC, it has remained one of the most popular works of mythology, being the Classical work best known to medieval writers and thus having a great deal of influence on medieval poetry. Content: Ovid emphasizes tales of transformation often found in myths, in which a person or lesser deity is permanently transformed into an animal or plant. Available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses>
Accessed on: March, 14th 2007.
For Ezra Pound, Arthur Golding’s (1536-1606) translation of the Metamorphoses “is the most beautiful book in the [English] language”, and he said he suspected this would be Shakespeare’s opinion as well. (POUND, 1987, p.58).
[4] Similarly, Drum-Taps, his volume on the American Civil War, was started in 1860, the year before the war, which begun in April, 1861. Coincidentally, the original title for this book was Banner at Day Break. Later it became “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” and was included in Drum-Taps. In reality, “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.239-244) is a conversation, or a play, in which the following characters discuss the oncoming war: Poet, Child, Father, Banner and Pennant (types of military flags).
[5] Both references from “To a Western Boy”, in “Calamus” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.285).
[6] “Fast Anchor’d Eternal O Love!”, from “Calamus” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.285).
[7] “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals”, from “Children of Adam” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.264).
[8] “One’s Self I Sing”, from “Inscriptions” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.165).
[9] There are other aspects that relate Whitman and Oswald, such as their use of free verse and their relationship with nature, which will be dealt with in section 3.5.
