Earth! my likeness!
Whereas in “Primeval my love” Whitman contrasts his earthy love for a woman with his ethereal love for an athlete, here the athlete is enamored: inflamed with love. In other words, this is one of the Calamus poems where Whitman’s depiction of male love crosses the line from adhesiveness to amativeness, from friendship to passion. The crossing is perilous; the words “suspect,” “fierce,” and “terrible” indicate that he is scared by the wild force of the passion and feels that there may be something wrong with it – so much so that he dares not describe it in any more detail. As he does so often, he simultaneously exposes and hides, with the double motion of a wave advancing and receding.
Whitman reveals something about the feeling by contrasting it with the earth’s appearance, which he describes as impassive, ample, and spheric. If his feeling is not impassive, it must be passionate. If it is not ample, it may be “lean and hungry.” If it is not spheric, it may be phallic (drawing on traditional imagery contrasting Mother Earth with a masculine sky, ocean, fire, or underworld). The feeling is terrible, but also natural and earthy – not artificial or diseased.
Despite Whitman’s attempts to sublimate his erotic longing into adhesion, expressed at most with kissing and holding hands, he longs for full erotic consummation. But he is constrained by the strong taboos, both religious and pseudo-scientific, against spilling seed outside of heterosexual union. He cannot express his ache the way he does in the heterosexual, procreative Enfans d’Adam poems, where he uses images of penetration and ejaculation – even violent images – without fear that they are too “terrible” to be named.
In addition to social disapproval of his homoerotic urges, Whitman may fear confessing a love that is not fully requited. Whitman does not suggest that the lover also has something fierce and terrible in him; thus, his greatest fear may be that the lover does not reciprocate his earthy passion. Years into his relationship with Peter Doyle, he was still afraid that the feelings were all on one side. He may have felt similar anxieties with young men like Harry Vaughan and Henry Stafford, who went on to get married and have children.
Finally, Whitman is expressing the inherently terrifying nature of erotic love. Passion can involve a fierce competition with the beloved for power, control, and dominance; it can be “athletic” in the sense of a naked wrestling that upsets the quiet reciprocity of holding hands. Even apart from any loss of power or equality, it may involve a loss of self to passion, an unnerving sense that one is not in full control of one’s own interior, that one is filled with hot, eruptive lava. While Whitman praises lawless love in poems like “We two boys together clinging,” in other poems, he is frightened by it and praises, instead, chastity, temperance, civic virtue, and moderation. In “Earth! my likeness!” he is torn between excitement and terror.