A promise and gift to California
“Robust” means strong, healthy, vigorous, or, when describing food or wine, rich in flavor and smell. The Latin robustus means firm and hard, and derives from the word for an oak tree (calling to mind Whitman’s live-oak). In delineating adhesiveness, Whitman emphasizes that it is robust, manly, and healthy, as opposed to morbid, effeminate, and degenerate. He wants male relations in America to be more physical – to include more holding hands, kissing, and walking arm in arm. But if part of him wants that physicality to be fully erotic, his official, bardic self fears that type of “robustness.” Men should be like a stand of oaks or a prairie of tall grasses: strong, erect, and self-reliant – their love for each other chaste and nonchalant.
Whitman never moved to the Midwest or West, and he traveled westward only twice (in 1848, moving briefly to New Orleans, and in 1879, touring as far as Colorado). In poems such as this, the Midwest and West are places in his imagination, more than his experience. Perhaps he is promising not a literal move but a poetic one; perhaps it is his books that will reside in the West. Part of what excites him about these regions is their potential. More raw, less tainted by Southern plantation culture and New England hauteur, they seem fertile grounds for his democratic messages of adhesion, equality, and self-reliance.
This is a programmatic, pedantic poem, unremarkable in itself. It is exactly the kind of poem Whitman parodies in “Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice,” when he tells the land of the prairies, the California mountains, and the Kanuck woods that they need to find someone else to be their singer. But Calamus needs poems like this to create the vital tension between Whitman’s bardic, prophetic persona and his experience of silent, secluding love.