What ship, puzzled at sea
In the 1867 Leaves of Grass, Whitman separated the two stanzas of “What ship, puzzled at sea” into two poems: “Here, Sailor!” and “What Place is Besieged?” In 1871 he moved “Here, Sailor!” to the Whispers of Heavenly Death cluster, and in 1881 he re-titled it “What Ship Puzzled at Sea.” As with “Music always round me,” the reader may wonder why he included the poem in either cluster, when it does not explicitly address love or death.
Whitman associates the sea – like music – with love and death, and he associates sailors with manly attachment. In his era, older and younger sailors often paired up in an erotic relationship known as “chickenship.” Perhaps, for Whitman, the perfect pilot who can guide the ship through the right channel is the older man who can guide the youth safely into the right kind of male attachment – whether that means having sex while avoiding social infamy or – just the opposite – maintaining an ardent friendship while avoiding the dangers of sexuality.
The pilot may also be the sage who can guide the puzzled soul in its ship of death safely to the other shore: personal immortality. In the second stanza, we learn that the commander, with his lethal artillery, is himself immortal. To “raise the siege” may mean to bring the glad news that our souls are immortal; the poet, like Jesus, slays death.
The pilot is also the poet, as the similar sound of the words suggests. The word “cons” in “What ship” links it to “Whoever you are holding me now in hand.” In that poem, Whitman warns us, “But these leaves conning, you con at your peril,/For these leaves and me, you will not understand.” The anthropomorphized ship, which “puzzles” and “cons,” resembles the puzzled reader conning Whitman’s leaves. Whereas in the earlier poem he warns us off, here he is ready to guide us in.
Why does a peaceful soul like Whitman use so much war imagery? War is traditionally the time when men come closest to death and each other. Soldiers enjoy the most socially sanctioned intimacy and ardor of any traditional male occupations. Whitman’s martial imagery also reflects his sense of his prophetic, poetic self as embattled. He was a radical voice: a working-class, unmarried, anti-clerical, profoundly original poet who had been fired from his last job for his unconventional views. Not surprisingly, he often felt his vocation as a contested struggle; it was not all joy and love. Finally, his combative language reflects his understanding that both love and poetry involve competition. Sometimes Whitman wants his reader to hold his hand or kiss him, but sometimes he wants the reader to be an “athlete” who wrestles with him and overthrows him. As he writes in “Song of Myself,” “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”