Who is now reading this
Whitman dropped “Who is now reading this” from subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, perhaps unhappy with its “morbid” nature. In this poem, his double nature, his ability to stand outside himself and observe (emphasized by his use of two parentheticals) is mainly a source of pain, in contrast to the joy, self-love, and amused bafflement that it occasions in passages like this one, from “Song of Myself:”
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.
“Transpire” comes from the Latin root spirare, to breathe. It can mean to pass a fluid through your pores or interstices; to excrete a fluid through a membrane in the form of vapor; or to happen, to be revealed, to come to light. Transpiration serves, among other things, as an image for the writing of confessional poetry. Where in “Scented herbage” Whitman was sprouting herbage from his dead breast, and in “O drops of me” he was trickling drops of blood, here he is transpiring the stuff of wrongdoing. “Stuff,” for Whitman, sometimes means semen (in “Song of Myself” he uses the term “fatherstuff” in this sense).
Transpiring “stuff” suggests two contrary things: using one’s semen inappropriately (homoerotically), or magically vaporizing it to avoid sin. Whitman often uses ejaculatory imagery in heterosexual or autoerotic contexts; but he resists it when writing about “adhesion.” Perhaps this avoidance relates to the accusations of sodomy when he was a Long Island schoolteacher, or perhaps it reflects a more general sense of shame. Whitman was never convicted of any crime, but, as he tells us, he is “self-convicted” and identifies strongly with felons and prostitutes.
As in “Long I thought that knowledge alone,” Whitman mocks his own bardic pretensions, his “grand assumptions and egotisms.” He is arming us against himself, giving us the tools to overthrow him, but at the same time he is going us one better – telling us that he already made the same critiques himself. The word “assumptions” is critical, because this is the poet who introduced himself in “Song of Myself” by saying: “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume, you shall assume.” In “Song of Myself” the word “assume” reflects a joyful sharing: poet and reader will assume a common set of facts and assume power together. But “assumption” also means taking a person into heaven, as in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. By using this word in “Who is now reading this,” Whitman may be mocking himself for his presumption of Assumption – deflating the miraculously chaste-but-fertile man-god persona he had used in earlier poems.
In many Calamus poems, the love of strangers is presented positively. Here, if only because it is surrounded by talk of wrongdoing and derision, it seems more problematic – either because it is wrong to love strangers, or because it is wrong (cowardly, perhaps) to love them without ever telling them. Often Whitman portrays the love of strangers as an affair of flitting glimpses, but here he says that he loves strangers secretly “a long time.” Perhaps these are ferrymen, bus drivers, or other working men that the poet sees constantly on his daily rounds but never dares to tell of his love.