pages of Leaves of Grass to embrace a living man or woman in an encoun-
ter of mutual ecstasy. The poet, who longed to make universal brother-
hood the norm in civil society, addresses a representative reader, yet un-
born, in an intimate tone that once again hints that even in death his
passionate self may “materialize” in the presence of the living reader.^41
When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible;
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me;
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and
become your lover;
Be it as I were with you. Be not certain but I am now with you.To “ascend to the atmosphere of lovers” into a purer love that may exist in
the realm of death represents a fantasy escape from the vagaries of mor-
tal (and probably homosexual) love. Thus “Calamus 38” (“Fast Anchor’d
Eternal O Love”) expresses the persona’s desire to reach this stratospheric
realm of idealized homosexual love, where, “disembodied, or another
born,” he will encounter “the ethereal, the last athletic reality, my conso-
lation.” The attainment of perfect love, it appears, must await the transi-
tion to perfect death. An even more intriguing love-death fantasy is
“Calamus 4” (“These I Singing in Spring”) which combines the themes
of male bonding and Waldeinsamkeit (forest solitude) with a bittersweet
evocation of an ideal world of the dead. The poem’s solitary persona
imagines that he has passed through the “gates” of an arboreal dream
world where he joins “a silent troop” of male companions—the trans-
¤gured spirits of friends he has known or imagined—who embrace him
with an acclaim and affection greater than the mortal Whitman could
ever have known. In this woodland Elysium the poet’s trans¤gured alter
ego dispenses lilacs and sage and the leaves of the pine, laurel, and wild
oak to each companion as a token of his affection. But to “him that ten-
derly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me” he ten-
ders the calamus root, a token of male bonding and, possibly, of immor-
tality.^42 As a symbol of homosexual love-death the calamus lends the
poem a certain Wagnerian ®avor. Rather than trusting to political en-
gagement, the Whitman persona expresses the hope that the combined
workings of death and love will ultimately resolve the contradictions be-
tween individualism and democracy. In the years preceding the Civil War,
when political action may have seemed frustrating to him, Whitman—
“So Long!” / 149