What think you I take my pen in hand to record?
Having compared himself to a pilot and a commander in the previous poem, Whitman pivots and returns to his theme of love that surpasses heroic feats and great cities. This time, though, instead of praising his own love, he retreats to the role of an observer, recording two simple men on a pier, parting the parting of dear friends with a passionate hug and kiss (although it is not impossible that one of the men is Whitman – that we are again observing him observing himself).
“Passionate” connotes intense feeling or enthusiasm, but also sexual desire. Like the hand-holding in “One flitting glimpse” and the flash of eyes in “City of my walks and joys,” this passionate kiss happens in a crowd, which tends to de-sexualize it, but, even so, modern readers will associate “passion” with sexual partners more than “dear friends.” “Passion” derives from the Latin word for suffering and can also refer to the agonies of Christ on his last night. To kiss someone passionately is an active, “robust” thing to do, but falling in love is “passive” (a word derived from the same root as “passion”) – something that happens to one, rather than something that one “does.” Whitman is ambivalent about passion; sometimes it makes him feel masculine, but other times it unmans him.
In his draft version, Whitman opened the poem with ‘What think you I have taken my pen to record,” omitting “in hand.” The phrase “in hand” adds several things. First, it makes the image more physical, more filled with Whitman’s presence, as he takes us into the process of his writing (“What think you?” he asks, spurring us to co-create the poem). Second, it adds poignancy, because we sense that he envies the two simple men; they hold each other passionately, but he is sitting alone, holding not the hand of a lover, but a pen; he is, as we know from other poems, “pensive.”
The poem is deceptively simple, but Whitman finds techniques to make it musical and poignant. He uses alliteration, with the p of “pen,” “perfect,” “pass,” “past,” “pier,” “parting,” “passionately,” and “prest,” and the g of “glory and growth of the great city.” As in “One fitting glimpse,” he evokes a particular, individuated scene by specifying that it happened “today” and “on the pier.” We are persuaded, correctly or not, that he is telling us about a real incident.