In Paths Untrodden
Whitman sets the stage for Calamus and introduces many of its themes in “In paths untrodden.” The poet speaks to us from a secluded spot in “the growth by the margins of pond-waters.” By contrast with his typical locales (city, seashore, and open road), the pond-edge is an intimate, private, and quiet setting.
Calamus is paradoxical from the first. If a path is untrodden, is it still a path? His notebooks contain a fascinating use of the word “untrodden:” “If I walk with Jah in Heaven and he assume to be intrinsically greater than I, it offends me; and I shall certainly withdraw from Heaven, – for the soul prefers freedom in the prairie or the untrodden woods.” The untrodden paths may be places where neither man nor God has walked before, where Whitman can be free and unrivalled as a creator.
A second paradox is that Whitman needs to be secluded to celebrate comrades. Only here can he respond as he would not dare elsewhere. He is not completely alone – he is talked to by tongues aromatic – but he does not disclose who or what the tongues are. They may be foreign tongues; they may be leaves of grass or aromatic plants, such as calamus; they may be the voices of absent friends, lovers or beloved authors; they may be animals, real or mythological, such as talking snakes or serpents. Or the poet himself may be speaking in tongues.
Whitman speaks to us from “paths,” not one path, because the Calamus poems explore many different perspectives, often contradicting themselves. He speaks from “the growth,” signaling that the poems will have a natural, organic, and developmental character; he will grow as man and poet as he writes them. He speaks from the margins: he will write outside convention, about things that take place where water merges with land, where he can stand partially immersed, and where categories become confused. Books, as well as ponds, have margins. Whitman will reject books (standards hitherto published) while revising a book, Leaves of Grass; he will write in the margins of his own testament. He once said that however stubborn he might be, he was not overly sure of himself: “I am still only on the edge of the world – the margin of its margin, so to speak.”
Whitman sets the time and place (or places). It is afternoon, this delicious Ninth Month, in his forty-first year. September is a liminal month, including both summer and fall, and a harvest month – a good month to gather delicious fruits. By calling it the Ninth Month, and capitalizing the words, he suggests that it is a time of birth: he is ready to labor and bring forth the secret that he has been gestating.
The poet offers three characterizations of what he has escaped from: the life that exhibits itself; all the standards hitherto published; and the pleasures, profits, and conformities that for too long he was offering to feed his soul. He is escaping from conventional society and its marketplace, but also from a past version of himself. It was Whitman, not some hostile or tempting other, who was offering his soul conformities. Now he is renouncing the way he had exhibited his own life, and the standards he himself had published.