When I peruse the conquered flame of heroes
This is a beautiful poem about love and loss, disguised until its final line. Whitman begins by talking again of fame, glory, political power, and riches. As in poems like “When I heard at the close of the day,” he contrasts them with love. But in this poem, there is a second twist, revealed at the end: the poet is experiencing “bitterest envy.” Thus, he shows the importance of love by describing the pain that its deprivation causes.
In “Scented herbage of my breast,” he had said that these poems, these “tomb-leaves,” were often more “bitter” than he could bear, and now he tells us more about that bitterness, although he leaves its exact nature ambiguous. Perhaps he never had love – of the kind he wanted. Perhaps he found love but then lost it – possibly to a rival. Perhaps love, at least his kind of love, is by nature fleeting, or even impossible, in his society.
As in many Calamus poems, Whitman blurs the lines between a pair of lovers and a group of friends. First, he reads of the “brotherhood of lovers.” Like the word “brethren” in “This moment, as I sit alone,” the word “brotherhood” suggests many things: familial love; associations of men, civic or religious; and the universal “brotherhood of man.” Particularly since he opens the poem talking about war victories and Presidents, we tend to read “brotherhood of lovers” as camaraderie, thinking about soldiers or revolutionaries facing “dangers” together. Perhaps this “brotherhood” is a model for the kind of adhesiveness that will hold the States together.
But in the penultimate line, where the men pass through youth, middle age, and old age together, affectionate and faithful, they seem more like a pair of lovers than a band of brothers. And when the poet becomes “pensive,” and then hastily puts down his book and walks away, he seems like a man nursing a hurt from an unfaithful lover. The words “pensive” and “envy” are locked together by their shared en sound. As we know from other Whitman poems, for him “pensive” means filled with sad thoughts and pent-up sexual yearning. He envies the lovers he reads of in books, but also, presumably, he envies a rival that his lover prefers to him. The lover walks away, causing the poet to walk away – the opposite of the steadfast heroes who, together, hold down the fort.
The word “odium” is intriguing because it is usually used when hatred is deserved – when a person does something despicable. Whitman does not reveal what the faithful lovers did to arouse odium. He does not say whether he agrees that the contempt was deserved or whether he is using “odium” only to suggest how strongly conventional society condemned the lovers, and, thus, what steadfastness they needed to remain unfaltering. Like the martial and judicial imagery in many Calamus poems, the word “odium” suggests the contested, agonized nature of manly attachment for Whitman. One thinks again of the story that he was tarred and feathered and run out of town for alleged sodomy, and his possible yearning for a time and place where that would not happen. It may be that what he envies is not a rival lover, but a society (real or imagined) in which enduring male love is possible and respected.