1 (p. 147) Come, said my Soul: Whitman “framed” the experience of reading the “Death-bed” Edition with this introductory poem (which also appeared on the title pages of the two variants of the 1876 Centennial Edition—Leaves of Grass: Author’s Edition, with Portraits and Intercalations and Leaves of Grass: Author’s Edition, with Portraits from Life—as well as Complete Poetry and Prose of X888) and “So Long!”, the farewell poem for every edition since 1860.
2 (p. 165) the word En-Masse: The first lines of the first poem in the “Death-bed” Edition recall the message of the first poem in the 1855 Leaves of Grass (“[Song of Myself]”): The poem celebrates Whitman himself and through him all others. Here Whitman seems to be simplifying and modifying his earlier, more blatantly egotistical statement.
3 (p. 173) temperate, chaste, magnetic: Throughout the 1850S, Whitman was intrigued by several developing pseudosciences. Animal magnetism was the study of the flow of “electricity” within the human body, including how this energy might be exchanged with the help of mediums or machines.
4 (p. 173) To a Certain Cantatrice: The poem was dedicated to Marietta Alboni (1823-1894), an Italian contralto who visited America in 1852 and 1853. Whitman often referred to his love for opera; as he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, “but for the opera, I could never have composed Leaves of Grass.”
“To a Certain Cantatrice,” “The Dead Tenor” (p. 648), and “The Singer in the Prison” (p. 520) are all dedicated to opera singers; many other poems and passages—including “That Music Always Round Me” (p. 583) and the “trained soprano” passage of “[Song of Myself]” (p. 29)—relate how moved and inspired he was by this musical genre. See Robert Faner’s Walt Whitman and Opera, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1951.
5 (p. 175) I Hear America Singing: Whitman’s vision of himself as a “singer” and “chanter of songs” was in part inspired by the popularity of family singing groups in mid-nineteenth-century America. In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of April 3,1846, Whitman wrote: “We have now several American vocal bands that in true music really surpass almost any of the artificial performers from abroad: there are the Hutchin sons, the Cheneys, the Harmoneons, the Barton family, and the Ethiopian serenaders—all of them well trained, and full of both natural and artistic capacity.”
6 (p. 183) camerado: One of Whitman’s variants for “comrade,” this word carries a suggestion of intimacy and tenderness. Whitman often associated the word “camerado” with “adhesiveness,” a term from phrenology that designates a love and closeness between friends (and one of Whitman’s code words for homosexual love).
7 (p. 190) and us two only : In 1860 four lines were included between this and the next line; they were omitted from all succeeding editions. The original lines are typical of the strong “adhesive” sentiments of the 1860 Leaves of Grass—feelings that Whitman chose to tone down or leave out of later editions.
O power, liberty, eternity at last!
O to be relieved of distinction! To make as much of
vices as virtues!
O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to
common ground! O adhesiveness!
O the pensive aching to be together—you know not why,
and I know not why.
8 (p. 190) Song of Myself- See the “Publication Information” section of this edition. Major changes over the years include the addition of stanza numbers in 1860 and the addition of section numbers in 1867. After 1855 (see p. 29) Whitman also began substituting dashes and more regular punctuation for his original ellipses, the length of which he sometimes modified to signify the length and depth of pauses. Additionally, he modified and toned down many of the more provocative passages. Many believe that the 1855 version of “Song of Myself” has a spontaneous, vital quality that is missing from the more ordered later editions. The later “Song of Myself ” is, however, easier to read, and the poetry often has a more graceful, even feel.
9 (p. 214) Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son: This important identifying line went through several transitions before achieving its current smoothness and combination of universality and specificity. In 1855 it was the energetic but clumsy “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” (p. 52); in 1867 it became the stronger statement “Walt Whitman am I, of mighty Manhattan the son”; in 1871 the line became overcrowded again: “Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son.” The line achieved its final version in 1881.
10 (p. 218) I hear the traind’d soprano (what work with hers is this?): This line was toned down significantly in 1867. In 1855 it read: “I hear the trained soprano .... she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip” (p. 57). In 1867 the line became “I hear the trained soprano- (what work, with hers, is this?).”
11 (p. 233) And feel the dull intermitted pain: The alterations made to this passage illustrate that over time Whitman’s style became more condensed and focused but also lost some of its specificity and energy. Consider the nonspecific imagery of the first stanza of section 37 and compare it to this section’s appearance in 1855:
O Christ! My fit is mastering me!
What the rebel said gaily adjusting his throat to the rope-noose,
What the savage at the stump, his eye-sockets empty,
his mouth spirting whoops and defiance,
What stills the traveler come to the vault at Mount Vernon,
What sobers the Brooklyn boy as he looks down the shores
of the Wallabout and remembers the prison ships,
What burnt the gums of the redcoat at Saratoga when he
surrendered his brigades,
These become mine and me every one, and they are but little,
I become as much more as I like.
I become any presence or truth of humanity here,
And see myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull intermitted pain (p. 72).
Most of the lines of the first stanza were removed for the 1856 edition; the second stanza began changing significantly after 1860.
12 (p. 234) Enough! enough! enough!: In 1855 the following lines appeared instead of this one:
I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,
The whirling and whirling is elemental within me (p. 73).
After 1860 all signs of this culminating moment were removed, which was typical of the regularized pacing and modified dramatic moments of the later editions.
13 (p. 244) The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there: In 1855 this section read: “Our rendezvous is fitly appointed .... God will be there and wait till we come” (p. 84). The alterations that culminate in the present shaping of these lines (which appeared first in 1876) demonstrate Whitman’s turn from more intimate, informal relationships to universal prototypes for love: The rendezvous morphs from one between Whitman and us, the readers, to Whitman and God, who becomes his “great Camerado, the lover true.”
14 (p. 251) I stop somewhere waiting for you: Perhaps the most significant change in editions of “Song of Myself ” after 1855 was the addition of end punctuation to this line. The new period at the end of the sentence seems unfortunate: The open-endedness of the line in 1855 was a perfect affirmation of the poet’s message.
15 (p. 252) Children of Adam: This group of poems (then “Enfans d‘Adam”) and “Calamus” both appeared first in the 1860 edition, and Whitman himself hinted at the relationship between these collections. While the “Calamus” cluster has as a focus manly friendship and af fection, the poems in “Children of Adam” involved heterosexual love and the products of connections between men and women (as the title suggests). Readers have long noted the coherence of the poems in the “Calamus” cluster, which seem to tell a personal tale of the poet’s own love and losses, while the “Children of Adam” poems are varied and seem less intimate. Whitman may have purposefully juxtaposed what was important for the individual (the deep emotions of “Calamus”) and the human race as a w
hole (the emphasis on procreation and continuity in “Children of Adam”); perhaps unconsciously, he demonstrates his sympathies for homosexual expression in the finessed quality of the “Calamus” cluster.
16 (p. 254) From sex, from the warp and from the woof Following this line, these two lines were omitted after 1860:
(To talk to the perfect girl who understands me—the girl
of The States,
To waft to her these from my own lips—to effuse them from
my own body).
17 (p. 254) I Sing the Body Electric: This poem, along with “The Dalliance of the Eagles” (p. 425), “A Woman Waits for Me” (p. 263), and several others, came under attack in 1882. Publisher James R. Osgood of Boston asked Whitman to alter several lines and passages on the grounds that the poems violated the public statutes concerning obscene literature. Whitman consented to a few changes, but when Osgood claimed they weren’t drastic enough, Whitman wrote back: “The whole list and entire is rejected by me, and will not be thought of under any circumstances.” He immediately wrote the essay “A Memorandum at a Venture,” a condemnation of the two prevailing attitudes toward sex in America: suppression and exploitation. It was published in June 1882 in the North American Review.
18 (p. 261) For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves: With these two lines and the following section, Whitman made a major addition to this poem in 1856. In section 9, Whitman seems to trace his hand over the human body; when one reads the passage, one gets the sensation that the poet is lovingly “touching” the reader from head to toe. Though he claims equal interest in all human bodies in the fourth line of section 9, the anatomical “tour” certainly favors the male form. When he does finally get to “womanhood,” his description is more maternal than sensual-and notably shorter. D. H. Lawrence was one admirer of Whitman who nevertheless found reasons to question Whitman’s take on women, citing the poet’s “‘Athletic mothers of these States—‘ Muscles and wombs. They needn’t have had faces at all” (Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923).
19 (p. 263) They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves: These lines depicting women as confident, active, and aggressive seem wonderfully progressive even today, though critics have pointed out that Whitman “masculinized” these female objects of his affection. A friend of many early suffragettes, including Fanny Wright and Lucretia Mott, Whitman was probably familiar with many of the writings on the “new womanhood.” The Illustrated Family Gymnasium (published in 1857 by Fowler and Wells, who sold Whitman’s First Edition in their bookstore) even contained images of uncorseted women lifting barbells.
20 (p. 264) I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me: These surprisingly aggressive lines have offended many readers. In an 1883 diary entry, feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote of this poem: “He speaks as if the female must be forced to the creative act, apparently ignorant of the natural fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male.” Some have looked more critically at this rape-like scene, while others see it as further evidence that Whitman simply did not know how to describe a heterosexual love scene.
21 (p. 267) I toss it carelessly to fall where it may: The condemnation of masturbation—the “solitary vice”—was a major goal of American social reformers in the 1840S and ’50S. Through the last twenty lines, the poet wrestles with guilt even as he equates the act and the elements with beautiful, organic imagery. The last six lines reference a story from Genesis 38 that is traditionally used to explain the condemnation of masturbatory practices: Onan was put to death by God for “spilling his seed” and thus defying God’s order to mankind to “be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). The speaker of “Spontaneous Me” may be as self-absorbed and greedy about his seed as Onan; notably, however, Whitman’s protagonist escapes Onan’s punishment.
22 (p. 270) Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City: In Whitman’s Manuscripts : Leaves of Grass (1860) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, p. 64), Fredson Bowers includes an early manuscript draft of this poem, originally titled “Enfans d‘Adam. 9,” that alters the sexuality of the love interest:
Once I passed through a populous celebrated city, imprinting
on my brain for future use, its shows, with its shows, architecture,
customs and traditions
But now of all that city I remember only the man who
wandered with me, there, for love of me,
Day by day, and night by night, we were together,
All else has long been forgotten by me—I remember, I say, only one rude and ignorant man who, when I departed, long and long held me by the hand, with silent lips, sad and tremulous.
23 (p. 274) Calamus: (See note 15, above, to Children of Adam.) Fitting for a collection of poems within Leaves of Grass, “Calamus” takes its name from an herb with pointy, narrow leaves. Whitman explained his choice to his English editor, William Michael Rossetti: “Calamus is a common word here. It is the very large & aromatic grass, or rush, growing about water-ponds in the valleys—spears about three feet high—often called ‘sweet flag’—grows all over the Northern and Middle States” (The Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 347). Whitman’s stress here is clearly on the universality of the plant, but there is another reason it may have caught his attention: The shape of its floral spike is suggestive of an erect phallus. Indeed, he had already sexualized “sweet-flag” in “Song of Myself (section 24). Considering that the poems in the ”Calamus“ cluster are held together by the sentiment of ”male bonding” (Whitman used the phrenological term ”adhesiveness“ to refer to this attachment between men), the choice of plant seems especially fitting.
The “Calamus” cluster has been cited as the “homoerotic” cluster compared with the predominantly heterosexual passion of the “Children of Adam” poems. The more unified and intimate feel of the “Calamus” poems suggests that Whitman was more in his element with the theme of same-sex love. Scholar Fredson Bowers—in Whitman’s Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860)—discovered that Whitman had written twelve of the “Calamus” poems as a separate series entitled “Live Oak with Moss”; these poems can be read as the story of an unhappy love affair, and many Whitman scholars have suggested an autobiographical component to these works. The series can be approximated by reading the poems in this sequence (numbers of poems are given in the annotations in the “Publication Information” section): Calamus 14, 20, 11, 23, 8, 32, 10, 9, 34,43, 36, and 42. For a full discussion of the “Live Oak with Moss” series, see Bowers, pp. lxiii-Ixxiv.
24 (p. 276) Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand: The teachings of Jesus in the Gospels (particularly the Book of John) inform Whitman’s message and language throughout this poem. This high, majestic tone permeates several of the poems new to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass: Consider also “To One Shortly to Die” (p. 585, originally part of the “Messenger Leaves” cluster) and “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals” (p. 268; “Enfans d‘Adam. 12” in 1860).
25 (p. 279) Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down: This is the first mention of the live oak in the Calamus series. The action of ”pulling off “ a twig is significant, particularly because it is the central act of ”I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” (p. 286).
26 (p. 280) Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness!: Adhesiveness was a phrenological term for same-sex friendship. On the phrenological maps of the human mind published in Fowler and Wells’s Illustrated Family Gymnasium, “adhesiveness” occupied a large site and thus had tremendous potential for affecting a person’s behavior. Whitman claimed he scored a 6 (the highest number) in “adhesiveness” on the phrenological chart he included in early editions of Leaves of Grass.
27 (p. 281) The Base of All Metaphysics: This poem shows Whitman in the role of professor—an unusual on
e for him, since, as he wrote in ”Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,“ “in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company, /And in libraries I lie as one dumb” (p. 276). For an interesting juxtaposition, see ”When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (p. 423).
28 (p. 286) I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing: This is possibly the first poem written for the ”Calamus” series; it is also credited with being the second in the ”Live Oak with Moss” series (see note 23, above). The poet is clearly comparing himself with the strong, solitary tree—though he has doubts about his ability to remain so. The doubt of the last line introduces the theme of yearning that runs throughout the ”Live Oak with Moss” grouping.
29 (p. 290) A Glimpse: The “Calamus” cluster was written and first published during what might be called Whitman’s bohemian years. On September 8,1858, he wrote an article entitled ”Bohemianism in Literary Circles” for the Brooklyn Times; after he was fired from the newspaper the next year, he began frequenting New York’s first bohemian meeting place, Pfaff’s Cellar. The restaurant/bar/café, at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker, was a second home to actors like Ada Clare and radical journalists such as Henry Clapp (whose Saturday Press published several of Whitman’s poems). “A Glimpse” is thought to be a description of the poet meeting a lover—perhaps Fred Vaughan—at Pfaff’s.
30 (p. 291) I Dream’d in ’a Dream: In Whitman’s Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860) (p. 114), Fredson Bowers includes this earlier, more focused version of the poem’s first lines:
I dreamed in a dream of a city where all the men were like brothers,