A leaf for hand in hand!
Whitman brackets the tumult of “Earth! my likeness!” with two bland poems, “To you of New England” and “A leaf for hand in hand!” Both are six lines long; both address men of varied American geographies in praise of adhesion; and both are didactic and unexciting. In “A leaf for hand in hand!,” he attempts to pump things up by ending the first eight phrases with exclamation marks, which, as in many of his weaker poems, seem mechanically applied and unjustified by the words they punctuate.
He characterizes the poem as a plain “leaf,” rather than a tomb-leaf, calamus root, confession drop, or carol – as if retreating from the “new standards” of Calamus to the pre-existing program of Leaves of Grass: as if diligently adding another “leaf” to his opus, rather than digging up something interesting from the black dirt.
Whitman addresses “natural persons, young and old.” The other use of “natural” in Calamus is quite similar; it occurs in “Mind you the timid models,” when he describes the reciprocal kiss as a “salute of American comrades, land and sea,” and asserts that “We are those two natural and nonchalant persons.” Here he seems to wish to “naturalize” and de-sexualize adhesion even more by limiting it to hand-holding and by including old persons as well as young.
The poet specifies working-class men: boatmen, mechanics, and “roughs.” These men are important because they are already “friendly;” it is among them that Whitman sees the most physical affection; they furnish the new model that will replace the timid conventions of the educated classes. They are “natural” persons – as opposed to more artificial, educated people. But even they need the poet’s encouragement for adhesion to become truly public and common, for it to become part of processions and parades and not just private behavior.
“Infuse” comes from the Latin for “to pour.” Whereas in the Enfans d’Adam poems Whitman wishes to pour his stuff into receptive women to breed a new race, here he wishes to pour himself in among comrades to inspire hand-holding. He wishes to fuse himself with the working-class men; he wishes to embrace them, but without the fierce and terrible passion in the previous poem – instead, with an adhesiveness that he feels safe to inscribe openly on his “leaves.”