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NOTICE: LGBTRAN Project on LGBT Quaker History
Mitchell Santine Gould, curator, LeavesofGrass.Org
June, 2011
possess the origin of all poems
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In keeping with the Sailor/Lover/Quaker (SLQ) model developed here at LeavesofGrass.Org, I have discovered that Whitman's fourth “Calamus” poem marks the beginning of a maritime subtext which informs the entire poem cluster. In a sense, “Calamus 4” is the logical beginning of the “Calamus” narrative per se, because “Calamus” poems 1, 2, and 3 are perfectly analogous to the “Inscription” poems of Leaves of Grass: they either make a personal appeal to the reader, or they issue an exalted manifesto about the poet's intentions. “Calamus 4” is a kind of Pilgrim's Progress, the recapitulation of a spiritual road trip. It shows how he actually arrived at the decision — celebrated in “Calamus 1” — to tell the secret of his nights and days (his need for comrades).
Read “Calamus 4”
Oddly enough, as we shall see, the logical end of this uber-narrative — a vision of its future destiny — is also found in the very next poem, “Calamus 5.” Therefore the “4” and “5” poems frame most of the remaining poems, notably excepting the final two poems, “Calamus 44” and “Calamus 45.” These latter poems are additional “inscriptions.” They reflect back on the text itself, commenting on Whitman's intention to expose himself and warning that his affectionate spirit may be hovering beside the unsuspecting reader. “Calamus” therefore has a recursive structure, like a Chinese box, with a metadata wrapper around the entire puzzle.
Read “Calamus 4” Read “Calamus 5”
As “Calamus 4” (or "Calamus per se") opens, Whitman portrays himself as a spiritual botanist, combing “the garden, the world,” for these. Now, it is not clear to the reader what these are, because it is not even completely clear to the poet what these are. The nearest “name” he can find for these are “tokens.” They seem to be tokens of his love. His quest to find them soon causes him to exit Gotham's orderly, well-manicured urban garden, through the “gates” of society. For reasons that will become obivous, we must implicitly assume that these gates were erected to protect him from the disorderly weeds, the nasty mud, and indeed perhaps even “the slippery slope,” if you will, of the pond.
Read “Calamus 4”
Searching quite boldly for spiritual tokens along the pond-side, he even wades in a bit. Unlike the patrons of the prim garden, he is not afraid of “the wet.” Leaving the pond, he continues through the countryside, where flowers of love grow rough and wild. He suddenly finds himself in a primordial state unknown to civilized man, where the spirits of those he loves — living and dead — swarm around him. I have previously emphasized this poem's fundamental affinity with spiritualism, and will not dwell upon that aspect now. Suffice it to say that he provides each spirit a flower which conveys his degree of romantic interest, using Victorian flower code — using either one of the popular lexicons, or perhaps a more private floral lexicon.
Read “Calamus 4”
Wading into the water again, he retrieves a unique token — calamus, or sweet-flag — not to be found in the heterosexual code-book. It can be shared “only [with] them that love, as I myself am capable of loving.” No one today knows exactly what he means by this: he could be referring to either a specific romantic, or a specific sexual, litmus-test for whatever he deems a satisfying male-male relationship.
Read “Calamus 4”
The powerful sociological metaphor embodied in “Calamus 4” has never been critically explored, but it would have been facile to Whitman's more astute contemporaries. The garden is “the world,” — that is to say, home to what both Quakers and Father Taylor, the Sailor's Apostle, refer to as “the world's people,” also known as “landlubbers.” And whatever the pond represents, it must be vast, — because he previously saw his lover here, who returns now, never to separate again. It apparently takes a long time to cross this pond and return. Therefore the Calamus pond is the same “herring pond” known sardonically to Transatlantic culture since the seventeenth century: the Atlantic Ocean.
Read “Calamus 4”
The phrase “across the pond” was being used in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle at roughly the same time as Whitman's own tenure there as editor. The lover who crosses the pond is, of course, a sailor, who stands for the man Whitman loves, as well as for an entire maritime society. Indeed, the reunion between Whitman and his lover implicitly mirrors the sailor's passionate kiss of parting depicted in “Calamus 32.” The value of “Calamus 4,” rightly understood, is that this poem encodes the origins of his institution of manly love, identifying it as sailor culture.
Read “Calamus 32”
Armed now with the magic of Calamus, his God-given mission is to leave the hidden forest and share his discovery with the world (and “the world's people”). Just as he expects, the world retorts that manly love will destroy The Sanctity of Marriage, but in “Calamus 24” he brushes this aside, vowing to establish “the institution of the dear love of comrades” “in every city of These States, inland and seaboard.”
Read “Calamus 24”
There is far more real information in this threat than meets the eye. Whitman's “seaboard” is the same as Whitman's “margins by the pond-side,” alluded to in both “Calamus 1” and “Calamus 4.” In 1860, sailor society is indeed marginalized — both socially and geographically. Father Taylor once rebuked his Methodist handlers, saying, “I remember when you kept a man at the door of your churches to shut out those who wore a tarpaulin hat and a blue jacket. I remember when I was a sailor-boy, and I had to run the gauntlet to get into your churches.”
Read “Calamus 1”
In Redburn (1849), Melville described the men who lived along Whitman's pond-side: There are classes of men... who bear the same relation to society at large, that the wheels do to a coach: and are just as indispensable. But... no sagacity can lift them out of the mire; for upon something the coach must be bottomed; on something the insiders must roll. ... [sailors] are the primum mobile of all commerce... And yet, what are sailors? What in your heart do you think of that fellow staggering along the dock? Do you not give him a wide berth, shun him, and account him but little above the brutes that perish? ...[sailors] are deemed almost the refuse and offscourings of the earth; and the romantic view of them is principally had through romances.
Shunned by the world but tightly insular, sailors in the great coastal cities are quarantined in ghettos called “Sailor Town” in which the sailors' “laxity of principle,” to quote Hawthorne, is more or less tolerated. At the end of his life, however, the poet tells Whitmanauts from England's “Bolton College” that Long Island's rural coastline was also “worthy of long study, and the folks too — queer folks with strong individualities: quite a good many spiritualists there.” Whitman's pond-side is a metaphor for all those maritime societies, urban and coastal, which are bound together by manly love, “more than by hoops of iron.” — “Calamus 5.”
Read “Calamus 5”
In “Calamus 30,” Whitman alludes to his own Manifest Destiny: to peddle “robust American love" “inland, and along the Western Sea, for These States tend inland, and toward the Western Sea — and I will also.” Note well that a “robust” love is one that can withstand a lot of harassment. It will apparently be more difficult to find tolerance on the prairies. In “Calamus 25,” Whitman therefore demands from “inland America” “the most copious and close companionship of men.” He calls out to “those with sweet and lusty flesh,” to insist that their “earth-born passion” is “never constrained” by their president and or their governors.
Read “Calamus 30” Read “Calamus 25”
The far-off destination of this pilgrim's progress is foretold in “Calamus 5:” There shall, from his efforts, be a new friendship. It will be called “Whitmanism”(?) It will circulate through The States, inland as well as seaboard. There will be some thorny problems with this new freedom, but “affection” will solve each one, and those who love each other shall be invincible [“to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,” according to “Calamus 34”]. They will ultimately make America completely victorious — in Whitman's name!
Read “Calamus 5” Read “Calamus 34”
These results show that “Calamus” is a Chinese box. The “Live Oak” escapades documenting Whitman's love pursuits exist at the most intimate level, and reveal the cussedness in “Calamus.” The larger story is a Manifest Destiny tale: Whitman is threatening to smuggle a boatload of sailor's calamus into the heartland, in a social reform that would — if successful — save American democracy before an impending Civil War can shred it. This Quaker endorsement of the power of brotherly love to forestall war was previously advocated in 1846 by sailor-lover-Quaker (and top Fourierst theoretician) Henry Clapp.
The following links provide more information.
Read “The Cussedness in 'Calamus'” Read “Walt Whitman's Quaker Paradox” Search The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Search Visits to Walt Whitman Search The Language of Flowers Search The Life of Father Taylor, the Sailor's Apostle Search Reburn Read “The Hawthorne-Melville Relationship” Read “World Wide Words” on “the big pond” |
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