women, suddenly springs from the pages of the book to embrace the
reader. Savoring the encounter as though it were occurring at the present
moment, the persona cries out,
Here put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss, or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.Stimulated by the thought that love and death will remain intertwined
throughout the soul’s timeless existence, the persona playfully conjures up
an alternative fantasy of postmortem spiritual af¤nity and sexual intimacy
in which Leaves of Grass—the mystic embodiment of the poet—is nestled
against the warm ®esh of a reader who loves him for his self and for
his book:
Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,
For thus, merely touching you, is enough, is best,
And thus, touching you, would I silently sleep and be carried
eternally.Thus he imagines himself nestled against the hip or the bosom of a mor-
tal lover or—to change the image—in a state of postmortem babyhood
in which he lies at the breast of the mother who, in poem after poem,
ambiguously personi¤es both the life-giver and the death-receiver. But
readers must be on the alert for Whitman’s verbal playfulness. Although
the invitation to “thrust” the ambiguous “me” (his self? his book?) be-
neath one’s clothing may indeed be a sensual fantasy, it can also have a
factual basis. The “Calamus” poems were composed in the late 1850s, after
the appearance in 1856 of the second edition of Leaves of Grass, a compact
volume that was almost a “pocket book,” small enough perhaps to be
“thrust” into the breast pocket or hip pocket of the reader’s garment.
The drama of imagining himself to be dead but still sentient and
eagerly sought after by lovers is played out in “Calamus 45” (“Full of Life
Now”), the last poem of the “Calamus” sequence. There the forty-year-
old poet, boasting that he is “full of life now” and “full of affection”
pictures himself enjoying a tête-à-tête with a reader centuries after his
physical death. In this scenario his “always living” self leaps from the
148 / “So Long!”