All about Walt Whitman

2.5.3 After the death of Carpus

There is a poem on this theme of nonphysical love, love beyond the flesh, or intangible love, which is really love between souls, as opposed to carnal, worldly or earthly love, which can be termed “romance” in worldly language, an attachment or involvement between people that is basically emotional and material (or concerned with the physical as distinct from the intellectual or spiritual, or immaterial, as Whitman himself liked to call it). The poem is “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd”, from “Children of Adam”:

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering I love you, before long I die,
I have travel’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once look’d on you,
For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,
Return in peace to the ocean my love,
I too am part of that ocean my love, we are not so much separated,
Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!
But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;
Be not impatient — a little space — know you I salute the air, the ocean and         the land,
Every day at sundown for your dear sake my love.

(WHITMAN, 2002, p.92)

This poem shows that the poet conceived of love as an inseparable flow of material and immaterial, physical and metaphysical; however, these conceptions are not the point here. The point, or more specifically the problem, is that he has difficulty in handling bodily relations. He asks the person who loves him to return to the “ocean”, the crowd, of which he also is a part. He recognizes the love the person has for him, and he returns that love. The only problem he has with it is that he is unable to deal with a close loving relationship, although it is natural to have one, which is indicated by the natural elements in it: ocean/sea, air, land. Nonetheless, the poet is not capable of close physical contact; at most he can share a look or a touch, as the other “drop” of the “rolling ocean the crowd” wishes from him. And even as part of that same ocean/crowd, he can not endure embodied proximity. Thus he envisages the separation by sea, which might be viewed here only as a symbol of separation, and not really a body of water (he and the other drop are parts of the same ocean), and perhaps a future re-joining, pointed by the “Be not impatient – a little space…”, but then probably when both are departed “from materials”, that is, when both are disembodied souls, reunited in a metaphysical love, after a metamorphosis. It seems to be Calamus after the death of Carpus: he feels so sorry for what happened that he chooses not to have intimacy with anyone else. He prefers to interact with other people at the spiritual level and to maintain some physical distance in personal relations. It might even mean that the poet chooses to interact with everyone, instead of with particular individuals, like the reed, which thrives by river banks among a multitude of grass plants. As he too is part of the ocean/crowd, he would rather walk unacquainted among the crowd than to be in private rooms with private persons, for merely touching is enough. It suggests that his personal love is diluted into communal love. “Communal” is the best adjective we have found for Whitman’s love towards the democratic crowd, the “en-masse”. We know that this expression has political connotations, but we also know that he used the calamus for a political purpose of uniting the people, as we can verify  in section 2.5.1 and section 2.5.4.

In this sense, communal and collective are very close, like community and collectivity, and both terms share common and political meanings. In reality, the topic here is his movement of changing the focus from private life to public life, from individual to collective, from person to crowd, which does not mean to repress or suppress the individual. It is the other way around: it is by nurturing the individual that we arrive at the en-masse. This is a very delicate balance that must be held in view, and certainly not by chance it is in the first lines of Leaves of Grass, in the poem “One’s Self I Sing”, from “Inscriptions”: “ONE’S SELF I sing, a simple, separate person; / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.” This indicates a perfect or ideal relation between the whole and its parts, which could be materialized in state and citizens, which means that each part/citizen is as important to the whole/state as the whole is important to each part of it and each part in relation to another. In this case, all parts are equally important with equal rights to every one, which is the principle of democracy or social equality, as he chanted in another line of the same poem mentioned above: “The Female equally with the Male I sing.” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.165).

In reality, the poem mentioned above, “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd”, was written to a woman; according to Allen (1955, p.340), “[…] the poem [was] said to have been written to Mrs. Juliette Beach.” And it shows how Whitman felt about women approaching him. Indeed, the physical distance that the poet put between himself and his lovers, whether male or female, prevented him from having a deeply carnal steady relationship with anyone; so that merely touching was enough. Allen gives the following account of this attempted affair:

But if she [Mrs. Juliette Beach] was actually aggressive in her love for the poet–like Mrs. Gilchrist a few years later–this poem [“Out of the Rolling Ocean”] probably made her feel that she might as well have been in love with a monk. Indeed, there is a positive religious connotation in the absolute renunciation and advised resignation of this response. (1955, p.341)

This kind of “renunciation” and detachment was also what the poet’s other great admirer, Mrs. Gilchrist, whose passionate love was not returned by the poet, received from him. Anne Gilchrist (1828–1885) was an English writer who traveled to the United States to meet Whitman. She fell in love with him after reading Leaves of Grass in 1869. After moving to the U.S. in 1876, she met Whitman and they formed a wonderful friendship (Mrs. Gilchrist’s husband, Alexander Gilchrist, with whom she had four children, died in 1861). She wished to give children to Whitman, but he refused to have a loving relationship with her. She moved back to England in 1879. As with others, he did not react the way she expected, and treated her only with affectionate friendship, as he did towards his many comrades, such as Tom Sawyer, Lew Brown, Peter Doyle, and Harry Stafford. Allen writes about Mrs. Gilchrist’s feelings:

[…] she insisted that she had not been disappointed in him, that he was all she expected him to be. But she must soon have realized that he simply could not return the affection for her that she felt for him. She was always to remain a loyal friend, but henceforth the friendship was to exist on the level that Whitman himself preferred—informal, companionable, but devoid of any sexual emotion whatever. (1955, p.477)

Thus the poet remained coherent with his way of dealing with what we call romance. This agrees with what we said before about his transfusing his personal love to a collective love. Perhaps this is the main reason for his trying to erase every trace of his personal life, to show that we need to cultivate our personal love to serve a greater purpose, which is to serve the life of the community. Perhaps he tried to conceal his private life because he was extremely disappointed in it. We do not really know the main reason. What we do know is that the life of the man comes through the writings of the poet. In fact, we, like all other critics, may only guess about the man. What we know is that Whitman never got married and there are no written records of intimate relationships. There are the letters he exchanged with his fellows and beloved friends, and nothing else. As for women, many critics and biographers speculate about why nothing more than friendship happened between the poet and Mrs. Beach or Mrs. Gilchrist. Possibly, he never really met a woman with whom he fell totally in love. Perhaps this was the real reason why he never accepted attachment to the women that lived and moved around him. Maybe this was his great disillusion in life, not finding the one that was right for him. Allen again provides us with a hint at this by quoting a poem Whitman wrote in 1840, at the age of 21, when he was making experiments in the use of “the friendship theme”, in Allen’s words:

O, mighty powers of Destiny!

When from this coil of flesh I’m free—

When through my second life I rove,

Let me but find one heart to love

As I would wish to love.

Let me but meet a single breast,

Where this tired soul its hope may rest,

In never-dying faith; ah, then,

That would be bliss all free from pain,

And sickness of the heart.

For vainly through this world below

We seek affection. Nought but wo

Is with our earthly journey wove;

And so the heart must look above,

Or die in dull despair.

(1955, pp.38-9)

Whitman’s wondering whether he would ever find “one” heart to love as he would wish to is definitely not about friendship. To find one heart to love would mean “bliss”, ecstasy, complete joy, his total aspiration and inspiration. And already he is talking about doing that in his “second life”, not in his current one, which is a sign that he knew from an early age that he would not find it. Allen adds that this poem was Walt’s “premonition” of the “solitary singer” he was going to be. The poet felt within his soul that he would spend a lifetime without the right person for him, as if the right person had died or had not been born at all and he knew he would have to remain alone in that life, waiting for a second life to meet this person somewhere “above”. He knew he would “carry that weight” for a long time, as The Beatles sang in this song from the album Abbey Road, from 1969. The poet would take a very long time, perhaps until his “second life”, to finally be able to have “golden slumbers” in his eyes, to quote another song from the same album by The Beatles. In short, we might not know what really happened to make him act that way; yet, we do know what he did with what happened: he “transmuted” everything into poetry (as is chanted in the poem quoted in section 2.5.2), to escape as Nature escapes, or “depart from materials”, and reincarnate in a new form of life, like Calamus himself, so that he could do something effective for his comrades.

_{»crosslinked«}