I dreamed in a dream, I saw a city invincible
Why does the city need to be invincible, and why would the whole rest of the earth contemplate attacking it? The city may be an image for the United States, the “shining city on the hill.” In “States!” Whitman promises that “those who love each other shall be invincible” and that “they shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name.” Here, in “I dreamed in a dream,” he may be propagandizing again for his vision of adhesive love, claiming that it will make America triumphant. As the first version of the United States was founded with a compact in Philadelphia, the “city of brotherly love,” Whitman’s version will be founded in the “new City of Friends” constituted in his dreams and poems.
As with Whitman’s other warlike imagery in Calamus, however, the idea of a city under attack may also reflect his anxiety about robust love; in other words, perhaps the city is threatened precisely because it is the city of manly love. As God destroyed Sodom, the world may want to destroy Whitman’s utopia as sinful: because every hour the men betray their homoerotic longings with their looks and words. In the Live Oak, With Moss draft of this poem, Whitman specifies that the men “tenderly love” each other and walk “holding hands,” but in the final version he leaves the nature of the robust love more vague.
The phrase “City of Friends” has a distinctly Quaker resonance. Philadelphia was founded and named by the Quaker William Penn, who envisioned his colony as a sanctuary from religious persecution. Quakers refer to themselves as the “Society of Friends.” Although he did not attend Quaker meetings, Whitman identified with the Quakers more than any other religious group and admired and wrote about Quaker leaders such as George Fox and Elijah Hicks (whom he saw speak several times). Whitman liked the fact that the Quakers did away with clergy and relied on the inner light, instead. The way that the Quakers related to one another – radically egalitarian and yet cohesive and spiritualized – gave him a potent image of “adhesion.”
“I dreamed in a dream” offers a counterpoint to “Of him I love day and night,” in which Whitman dreams of cities full of death and his lover is present only as a ghost twice removed. Here he dreams about cities full of love. But again he is only dreaming, as he emphasizes by writing not just “I dreamed” but “I dreamed in a dream” and then repeating “I dreamed” in the second line. The new City of Friends is like the cities dreamed by the Old Testament prophets; it is a beautiful vision and a rebuke to actually existing cities where robust love has not yet been embraced. It is, as of yet, a republic of words.
The City Hall of Camden, New Jersey has three inscriptions carved into it – one from the Bible, one from Shakespeare, and one from “In a dream I saw a city invincible.” Originally a suburb of Philadelphia, located across the river and linked by ferry service, by 1870 Camden was an industrial hub of its own, with 125 factories. Whitman moved there in 1873 to live with his brother George after suffering a severe stroke. In 1884 he bought a house on Mickle Street, where he lived until his death in 1892. Today, Camden is a small city of some 72,000 people, suffering, like other American cities, from high degrees of segregation and inequality. Perhaps someday the United States will live up to Whitman’s vision – his “rich legacy” – and its cities will be, if not invincible, at least cities of friends.