We two boys together clinging
In composing this poem, Whitman made a crucial change from a poem about himself to a love poem. His manuscripts include a draft titled “Razzia” (an Arabic word for a raid or foray):
Up and down the roads going – North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying – elbow stretching – fingers clutching,
Armed and fearless – eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than myself owning – Sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests, alarming – Air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea- beach dancing,
With birds singing – With fishes swimming – With trees branching and leafing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling my foray. –
Whitman turns a static portrait of self-reliance into an exhilarating love poem by changing pronouns and adding the first two lines, “We two boys together clinging,/One the other never leaving.”
Whitman surprises the reader by portraying himself as a boy, despite the fact that he turned forty in 1859 and had long sported a gray beard. The word “boys” does many things in the poem. It signals that the poem is a poignant dream, a wish-fulfillment, a foray into the imagination. It makes the lovers fully equal – not teacher and élève, prophet and acolyte, or poet and reader. It makes the armed thieves less menacing – suggests that their excursions are more playful than destructive. It makes the lovers less erotic – more “innocent” of lust – than if the poem read, “We two men together clinging.” Finally, the word “boys” makes the dream of “never leaving” seem fragile. Boys may vow never to leave each other, but life tends to divide them as they grow up, move about, and join institutions like banks, churches, and armies.
Whitman creates a beautiful tension between the images of marauding lovers, armed and fearless, and two boys clutching each other’s fingers and clinging to each other. To cling is to hold together, to adhere as if glued firmly, or to have a strong emotional dependence. When people “clutch fingers,” it is often because they are afraid. Clinging and clutching continue the Calamus motifs of twining and intertwisting – in contrast to “The prairie-grass dividing,” where companionship consists of blades of grass standing separately in a crowd. In “We two boys,” love is aggressive and yet frail. A “foray” can be a raid, a sudden invasion, but also a tentative attempt to do something in a new or different field.
It is interesting that Whitman disdains “menials,” given his embrace of working men. Perhaps he associated menials with feudal serfs, rather than with democratic workers. Whitman seemed to love certain types of working men – firefighters, drivers, mechanics, sailors, and farmers – more than menial laborers (often people of color), stuck in factory jobs, domestic service, and other less autonomous roles.
Nature plays a dual role in the poem. Associating the boys’ love with birds singing, fish swimming, and trees leafing makes it more natural and less alarming. Unlike much of Whitman’s nature imagery, these three images are not particularly sexual, and yet they emphasize that the boys’ love is wild and free from social conventions. The singing birds and “leafing” trees also link the love to Whitman’s poetry, his wild “leaves.”
Whitman specifies that the armed, soldiering boys are making their excursions “North and South.” John Brown made his famous foray to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in October 1859 and was executed that December. Clearly, the two boys are not like John Brown – a puritanical rebel whose scorn for American statutes came from his sense of higher, sacred laws. They own no law less than their selves; they are seeking their own freedom, not anyone else’s. But by writing “North and South” Whitman creates a fantasy world in which North and South are united – not by laws and morals but by amoral adhesion and passion.
Whitman wants adhesion to become our primary civic virtue, the glue that holds the nation together – stronger than laws or government – but he also recognizes that passionate love can be exclusive and lawless. The loves of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Thelma and Louise are thrilling because, even though they are inevitably defeated by law and order, they free themselves for a few glorious moments. To be great means to be greater than something else; and love, they make us feel, is greater than virtue.