Are you the new person drawn toward me
The narrative arc of Calamus is not a linear plot or pilgrim’s progress; rather, it is a wave-like ebb and flow, punctuated by abrupt changes, surprises, and reversals. Whitman moves from the happiest love poem in the cluster to the darkest self-critique. He opens with eight “terrible questions about appearances.” Where the questions in “Hours continuing long” concerned his lover’s lack of constancy, now Whitman focuses on his own unreliability. The poem also picks up themes from “Whoever you are holding me now in hand” – especially the deep ambiguity about whether he is addressing a spiritual acolyte, reader, lover, or some combination of the three.
In “Whoever you are,” Whitman leaves open the possibility of a “very few” candidates for his love proving “victorious,” and in “Of the terrible question of appearances,” his radical skepticism is answered by love, but in this poem the skepticism, centered on the poet himself, is unanswered; the poem ends with the word “disappointed.” The appointed one, the anointed one, is a sham, without significance or point; he has broken his appointment with us. Compare, for example, “To a Common Prostitute,” in which Whitman as poet-prophet redeems even prostitution with his love and his significant look:
My girl, I appoint you with an appointment – and I
charge you that you make preparation to be
worthy to meet me,
And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till
I come.
Till then, I salute you with a significant look, that
you do not forget me.
“Precipitate” means that the lover’s next step toward Whitman will reveal the truth, which will throw the lover violently down the precipice – like Satan expelled from heaven or Adam exiled from Eden. But to precipitate is also to cause to separate from a solution or suspension; or to cause vapor to condense and fall or deposit. Whitman sometimes uses the words “float” and “suspension” to express his sense of all material things being spiritualized, and life and death being bound perfectly together. Disillusionment precipitates a person out of the float into an isolated, puny being – but that precipitate may be a truer essence than the foggy illusion that preceded it.
“Prest,” which picks up the p, s, and t sounds from “step,” “precipitate,” and “past,” is another rich word choice. The readers/lovers/acolytes have pressed on the poet like a button, expecting immediate results, only to be disappointed: poetry, prophecy, and love do not work that way. They have pressed on him hoping to find something solid and substantial, only to find a flimsy façade. They have oppressed him with their pressure, causing him to retreat and fall silent. They have “pressed on” like heroic, brave troops, only to lose the battle.
The reader, lover, or acolyte is a dreamer; his perceived reality is merely “maya.” Whitman’s use of this foreign term, drawn from Indian philosophy and religion, adds to the reader’s sense of confusion. In the Vedanta “maya” means the sense-world of manifold phenomena, which conceals the unity of absolute being. But in this poem, there is no sense of an ultimate reality behind appearances, just as there is no sense of a real Whitman – a true face – behind the façade. What the façade conceals is not reality but unreality: a duplicitous man, an unreliable world. Whitman has hurled us into an abyss.