Music always round me
At this point, the twenty-first poem in Calamus, the reader is used to abrupt shifts in tone, theme, and content, but it is still surprising to read a poem that – on its face, at least – speaks only of music and not of camaraderie, friendship, or love. Whitman himself had second thoughts, and in the 1872 edition of Leaves of Grass he moved it to the new Whispers of Heavenly Death section. Throughout his life, he associated music strongly with both love and death.
The most erotic element in the poem is the “transparent base, shuddering lusciously under and through the universe.” Since Whitman has just described a tenor and a soprano, we are expecting a bass, not a base, but by punning on “base” he gets two words in one. Grammatically, we could read “transparent base” as referring to the soprano, but the fact that the soprano sails buoyantly over the tops of the waves, whereas the base shudders lusciously under and through the universe, makes the base seem like a bass drum, upright bass, or bass voice sounding “beneath” the other instruments or sounds.
“Luscious” means having a delicious taste or smell, so it expresses the synesthetic effect of music, the way it activates all the senses, not just hearing. It also means sexually attractive, richly luxurious, and excessively ornate. Whitman creates a lush, sensual music in “Music always round me” with his use of u sounds: the short u’s in “”shuddering,” “lusciously,” “under,” and “triumphantly,” and the long u’s in “tutti,” “funeral,” “flutes,” “volumes,” and “moved.”
Words like “lusciously” and “exquisite” capture some of the ways Whitman felt about opera: his favorite form of music and a key influence on his poetry. Sitting in a crowd at the opera was an oceanic, moving experience. It was profoundly democratic: a great mass of people participating in a musical rite together. Opera allowed individual voices to express themselves while harmonizing them and joining them in tutti – sections performed by all the performers. Yet, as his use of the Italian loan word, “tutti,” suggests, opera was a foreign import with elitist aspects. It could be considered “luscious” in the sense of excessively ornate, in contrast to the plain style Whitman championed. It was exquisite in its craftsmanship, but also in its esoteric appeal. Music was – some Puritans and evangelicals believed – “base” in the sense of sordid and immoral, because it aroused “luscious,” erotic feelings and death instincts, causing exquisite pleasure and pain. Perhaps there is something suspect in the way the voices “wind” like serpents in and out, striving to excel each other not in reason or virtue but in emotion and “fiery vehemence.”
These darker undertones are subtle. The main thrust of the poem is toward joy. Whitman is “elated” by the “glad notes of day-break;” the soprano is buoyant, and the flutes and violins are sweet. What the poet does is “hear,” “fill himself” with music, “listen,” and then “think,” “begin,” and “know.” One cannot know the performers without having been filled with them, moved by them, aroused by them. Having been through those passages, one knows them better than they know themselves, because one cannot love one’s self the way one can love another; and because singers – like poets – cannot know all their own meanings; only an audience can complete the circuit.