Calamus Taste
Whitman allows us to listen to him thinking out loud, overhearing himself, and revising himself (or, better yet, his selves). In Calamus, this happens both within individual poems and in the movement from poem to poem. A good example is this poem, which opens, “Calamus taste,/(For I must change the strain – these are not to be pensive leaves, but leaves of joy).”
In subsequent editions Whitman deleted the first two lines and titled the poem “Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone.” Perhaps this deletion made the individual poem stronger, but it detracted from the sequence as a whole and from the vivid opportunity to catch him in the middle of a second thought. “Are you the new person” had proven too dark; he needed to “change the strain” to be more in keeping with his persona as a cheerful poet, an apostle of good news.
In the phrase “change the strain,” Whitman creates verbal music – with the long a and n sounds – as well as depth of meaning, because a “strain” is both a musical air and an injury from difficult exertion or tension. “These are not to be pensive leaves,” he writes, with “pensive,” as we have seen in other poems, connoting overthinking and pent-up erotic longing; rather, they should be leaves of joy, and “roots and leaves unlike any but themselves.” He wants to bring cheer without relying on banal satisfactions; he wants to bring a new gospel from the “wild woods” and the “pond-side,” as he had done in “In paths untrodden” and in “These I, singing in spring.”
This is one of the few Calamus poems where Whitman includes women and does not use the words “friends,” “lovers,” or “comrades;” perhaps he is trying to avoid feelings of homoerotic shame and revert to his self-image as a heterosexual fertility god. The time is spring – March, the third month, when the winter breaks up – and the setting is idyllic, with the sun rising, birds gushing, fragrant flowers blooming, and young people wandering out in the fields.
The poem closes with one of Whitman’s strongest statements of the reader’s role as co-creator. The poet will put the love buds within you, but it is up to you to bring the warmth of the sun to them. You must become the aliment and wet; the buds are comprised in you just as much as in themselves, and need to come slowly up out of you. Whitman urges you not just to provide fertile soil, but to become fertile soil – fearing not the wet (as he had said in “These I, singing in spring”) – fearing neither the sexuality nor the mortality of earthiness.