One flitting glimpse, caught through an interstice
In “When I peruse the conquered flame,” Whitman is alone, holding a book, pensive with bitter envy for the love he reads about. In “One fitting glimpse,” by contrast, he sits silent and happy in a crowded, noisy bar, holding hands with his lover. Intriguingly, he does not present the scene directly, but rather as seen through a wall. At first we assume that the poet is looking through a chink in the wall, but then it turns out that we are the ones looking at him.
Our view of the scene is flitting, and the scene itself is flitting, too: a gap in time, a break in the conventional order. The tavern becomes a respite, an oasis, a safe harbor. In this, the only winter poem in Calamus, the men are crowded by a stove, late at night, for a moment of light in the cold darkness. A warm hearth on a winter’s night – we might expect it to be a cozy cabin or family home, but Whitman sets the poem in a public room – a bar – because that is where the love he celebrates is most at home.
The glimpse through an interstice makes us voyeurs, secret sharers in the scene, and aesthetic appreciators of a “framed” portrait. It links us to the writing poet, who is both in and out of the game, observing himself while he makes himself observed by us. While Whitman’s dual self sometimes torments him, sometimes it delights him, as it is here, where the pleasure of holding hands is amplified by observing, recalling, and writing about it. It is just an ordinary, unremarkable scene of workmen and drivers in a bar, but something secret is silently occurring in the corner. Whitman hints at something taboo about the seemingly innocent holding of hands: we cannot tell if he is distinguishing it from the smutty jests, linking it to them, or both.
The word “content” appears in three Calamus poems. In “Hours continuing, long, sore, and heavy-hearted,” Whitman is anguished because his lover is content without him. In “O love,” he assures the reader that he is content, but he does not really seem it: he is alone, and he is “dying, always dying.” “One fitting glimpse,” however, offers a beautiful picture of mutual contentment. As in other happy scenes in Calamus, love is nonverbal (until put into a poem): the lover silently approaches, and he and Whitman speak little, “perhaps not a word” – in contrast to the noises, oaths and smutty jests. The half-rhyme of “silent” and “content” further seals the association.
Whitman may be using the tavern environment, with its traditional, venial sins such as drinking and cursing, as the vulgar, crowded locus of heterosexual love, to be contrasted with the chaste, manly attachment occurring silently in the corner. Or he may be presenting the barroom scene, with its working-class camaraderie, as a distinctly homoerotic environment: the “smutty” soil from which the flower of Whitman’s love emerges. Both readings seem equally valid, and it is this kind of ambiguity that makes the Calamus poems so deep, mysterious, and yet open to conversation.