This moment, as I sit alone, yearning and thoughtful
This poem repeats the phrase “I sit alone” from “Passing stranger.” Whitman often portrays himself sitting alone in Calamus, whether celebrating the love of comrades, waiting expectantly for a lover to come, raging with doubts and suspicion, or thinking yearningly about strangers. These poems of solitude make those in which he sits holding the hand of a beloved man all the more poignant.
As in many Calamus poems, Whitman dreams of reciprocity and equality and enacts them in his language by repeating phrases, in this case “yearning and thoughtful.” What is less typical for the American bard is the international scope of his yearning, extending as far as China, Russia, and India. Whitman was an imperialist who believed in the special destiny of the United States to bring democracy to the world. He regarded Canada, Cuba, and Mexico as future states and once called the Mexican War “the best kind of conquest.”
Yet, for a man of his time, Whitman was largely free of anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant prejudices. He said that while he loved America, he did not love it at the expense of other nations. His greatest love, Peter Doyle, was an Irish immigrant. When one of his visitors spoke in favor of restricting immigration, Whitman protested: ““Restrict nothing – keep everything open: to Italy, to China, to anybody. I love America, I believe in America, because her belly can hold and digest all – anarchist, socialist, peacemakers, fighters, disturbers or degenerates of whatever sort – hold and digest all.” As this quote suggests, part of his tolerance toward immigrants came from his confidence that they could be melted down into proper Americans. Conversely, his prejudices about African-Americans and Native Americans were linked to his doubts that they could be fully assimilated.
On a related note, Whitman uses “dialects” instead of “languages” – as if there were a universal language binding men together, with all their different tongues merely dialects. Whitman never learned another language, although he was fond of using loan words, especially from French. One suspects that he viewed all languages as dialects of English; at the least, his use of the term shows a cheerful confidence in mutual intelligibility and understanding.
Despite his blind spots, Whitman dreams of international camaraderie, and, as in the case of American camaraderie, it will draw strength from men’s yearning, their latent attraction to each other’s beauty, wisdom, and benevolence. Men should be brethren, meaning that they should treat each other like siblings, but also like fellow members of a religious sect. “Brethren” was a term used particularly by the Pietist denominations that emerged in Germany in the 18th century. The Pietists, like the Quakers, believed in an inner light linking man to man – a form of sacred adhesion that Whitman also celebrated.
A wish for universal brotherhood can be saccharine. “This moment” avoids that fate because Whitman imbues his yearning with personal urgency. When he closes the poem, “I know I should be happy with them,” the reader senses that the poet is not happy, that he still feels incomplete. He is sitting alone, after all; something is not working out for him in America. In fact, readers in other countries, especially England and Ireland, became some of Whitman’s most passionate enthusiasts, and they were among the first to embrace his homoerotic side, even when he himself refused to acknowledge it.