O drops of me!
In Whitman’s notebooks, he makes an entry titled “Poem of Tears,” in which he asks, “Can I not make a poem in which the tears drop down in great drops?” In “O drops of me,” he turns from the consuming flames of “Not heat flames up” to an invocation of red, hot “confession drops” – the poet’s “scarlet letters.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850, and it was an instant best-seller – one of the first mass-produced novels to achieve critical and popular success – the kind of success Whitman yearned for but never achieved in his lifetime. Whitman criticized Hawthorne’s “morbid streak,” but he himself had a strong morbid streak, which he sometimes repressed but sometimes, as in this poem, let loose. The word “scarlet” means “red,” of course, but it also means “sexually immoral” – drawn from its use in Isaiah 1:18 and Revelations 17:1-6 to describe a “scarlet woman.” Certainly, words like “confession,” “stain,” “blushing,” and “ashamed” draw on religious tradition, as do the images evoking Christ and other martyrs.
Instead of a fertility god fructifying the nation with his semen, Whitman offers himself as a passive, suffering man-god, bleeding poems from his wounds. Whereas in “Scented herbage of my breast,” the poem-leaves sprout from his dead body; here the confessional poetry transpires while he is still alive, through “wounds made to free” the blood from its prison. Whitman leaves it ambiguous who is making the wounds – God, the muse, the public, life, love, or the poet himself.
As in “Scented herbage,” the imagery is grotesque and morbid, but whereas that poem centers on a corpse and grave, here the poet is very much alive – to pain, but also to creativity; and the bleeding is more erotically charged. Whitman calls on the blood drops to stain every page, song, and word with their scarlet heat; to saturate them, all ashamed and wet. The blood drop imagery is intensely feminine and masculine at the same time. In “Song of Myself” he mingles imagery of blood, semen, and sap in a more traditionally male, heterosexual vein: “You my rich blood, your milky stream pale strippings of my life” and “Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you.” In “O drops of me” the poet is more receptive and passive, more wounded than wounding.
Poetry as wounding may sound dark and masochistic, but, fascinatingly, Whitman is writing about freedom and light. Confession is painful, but candor frees the drops from suppression – prison and concealment – and lets them bring generative warmth, wet, and light to his poetry. Paradoxically, the poem does not tell us what the drops are; it does not actually make the confession it is describing. The poet blushes, so that we can see the red on his face, but he does not tell us why he is blushing, or how we can see “it all” in the “light” of the blushing drops. Perhaps the drops are all the poems in Calamus – all of his “frailest leaves.” He may be instructing us to read Leaves of Grass in the light of Calamus – as in the 1876 preface to Leaves of Grass, where he says he would “make a full confession” – that he wrote his work to arouse “streams of living, pulsating love,” especially the “fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man.”