You bards of ages hence
Whitman continues to develop the theme of love as more important than poetry, patriotism, prophecy, and glory, focusing now on the poet’s capacity for love. By concentrating on the greatness of his loving nature, he finds a way to integrate requited and unrequited love, and by addressing future bards, he finds a way to explicitly reject poetic glory while implicitly claiming it. He assumes that future bards will write about him and know about his poems, his prophecies, and his successful leadership of the States to glory, but then he tells them that there is something even greater than all that: the measureless ocean of love inside him.
“Measureless” has many connotations. In addition to evoking vastness, Whitman is playing off the fact that “measure” can mean poetic meter, a legislative bill, the width of a full line of type, or a plan of action – thus emphasizing the ways that love transcends the glories of publishing poetry and building a nation; it overthrows all rules and careful plans. In “In paths untrodden,” Whitman had promised “new standards” to replace those already published, and now he offers an example: the new standard, the new measure, is that of the tenderest lover. He assigns the task of publishing it to future bards, but certainly he has made a good start by publishing this poem.
Immediately after telling us that he is the tenderest lover, Whitman describes taking “lonesome walks,” being “pensive,” lying “sleepless and dissatisfied at night,” and knowing too well the “sick, sick dread” of unrequited love, before ending with happy images of roaming with his lover – far away, apart from other men, or sauntering the busy streets. He merges unrequited love, secret love, and public camaraderie into a single sentence. Love comes and goes, waxes and wanes, but in a way that is natural; the ocean within matches the ocean without. Even “sick, sick dread” is framed in a context of overall healthiness; and the word “secretly” does not connote something dangerous and esoteric, just something painful. Likewise, whereas in “Whoever you are holding me now in hand,” the hill was the site for secret, passionate love, here the hills, fields, and woods seem idyllic and innocent (the mildly archaic word “twain” heightens this sense), even if they take the poet and his lover “apart from other men.”
“Pensive” is a word Whitman often associates with the ache and yearning for love (see “Starting from Paumanok” and “Spontaneous Me!”, for example). He uses it in ways that echo “penis,” “pen,” and “pent,” another word he connects to yearning, as in “From Pent-Up, Aching Rivers,” in which he describes the “pent up rivers of myself,” the “hungry gnaw that eats me day and night,” and offers these homosexual and heterosexual images of yearning: “The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back lying and floating,/The female form approaching – I, pensive, love-flesh tremulous, aching.” For Whitman, being “pensive” – thinking poetically and deeply – is a physical, eroticized process, connected with aching, pent-up dissatisfaction.