Passing stranger
In “Who is now reading this” Whitman discloses, as if somewhat ashamed, that he secretly loves strangers and never tells them. In “City of my walks and joys,” he describes the strangers’ flash of eyes as a great delight, a source of pride and joy. In “Passing stranger,” he grapples with the theme again, yielding a more ambiguous, “strange” result.
The poet and stranger “flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,” rather than joining together. The poet “recalls” that they grew up together, ate and slept together, with the result that their bodies became interdependent, co-owned. That interdependence helps him understand why and how the stranger gives him the pleasure of his eyes, flesh, and face, while, in return, taking pleasure in Whitman’s beard, breast, and hands.
The visceral aspect of love – eating and sleeping together – is displaced into the past and desexualized, transmuted into family love. Now Whitman and the stranger can be chaste and mature, like adult siblings enjoying their family resemblance. By specifying both sexes, as he rarely does in Calamus, he further defuses the homoeroticism.
The last three lines begin with “I am,” suggesting an effort toward self-definition and self-exposure, but also a sense of compulsion or duty. Who or what is telling Whitman that he is not to speak to the stranger? We do not know, but his instructions are to think of the stranger when he sits alone, or wakes at night alone, and then to wait until they meet again and, most enigmatically, to “see to it” that he does not “lose” him.
If the stranger is so attractive and important, it is odd that Whitman is not speak to him. Perhaps the time is not yet right. Perhaps it will take repeated passings, or a meeting in some other context, or a meeting after preparations have been made. Or perhaps Whitman is never to speak to the stranger, and their future meetings will be just as flitting as this one; the eye-contact itself is the ultimate good. A third possibility is that the future meetings will take place only in his mind; the way to “not lose” the stranger is to memorize him, dream about him, and perhaps write about him in a notebook or immortalize him in a poem.
It is easy to understand the erotic appeal of gazing at strangers and then dreaming about them alone, particularly when homosexual acts are illegal. It is harder to understand how this type of love fits into Whitman’s dream of an adhesiveness that would bind the United States together. Anonymous crowds and solitary fantasies do not seem like civic glue. But assuming a world in which crowds and solitary individuals exist – an urbanized, modern world – what prevents that crowd from becoming a dangerous mob, and what prevents those individuals from being dangerously alienated? Cultivating a habit of loving strangers could be an element of civic cohesion. If we want fraternity but also individual freedom, if we want crowds to be amiable but not all-consuming, if we want conventions that bring people together without binding them into conformity, and if we want men to acknowledge strangers as something other than threats, then perhaps we should stroll the streets like a poet who sees every man as a potential friend, lover, or long-lost brother.