Primeval my love for the woman I love
The first two lines of “Primeval my love” sound like as if they belong in Whitman’s explicitly heterosexual Enfans d’Adam poems. Whitman’s love for the woman is primeval: first-created, primitive, and fundamental, it harkens back to Adam’s love for Eve. By specifying “the woman I love,” Whitman makes the poem sound grounded in real experience. But the second line raises some interesting flags. “O bride! O wife!” is strange because Whitman never married. Furthermore, what is resistless and enduring is not a passion but a thought. Whitman certainly loved the thought of primeval love for women, and he often expressed it in vivid, earthy terms, but he may not have experienced it as strongly as he wrote about it.
“Primeval my love” then turns into a Calamus poem, but one unlike any other – not only for the direct comparison with heterosexual love but also for the unique tone – blending the abstract, personal, celebratory, and wistful in a few short lines.
Whitman is trying hard to desexualize his love for a man by contrasting it with primeval, heterosexual love. It almost sounds as if male love takes place in heaven, rather than on earth; as a disembodied, pure spirit, the poet floats in the ether. But two words make the love seem more earthy and less angelic: “athletic” and “roving.” For years, Whitman had roved Long Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan – taking walks, “floating” on buses down Broadway, and seeking out “athletes.”
In addressing his lover as “O man,” he sounds an almost Biblical, abstract note, but in addressing him as “sharer of my roving life” he seems to be talking to a real individual. But perhaps, as in “We two boys together clinging,” he is only daydreaming about someone to share his roving life. In that case the “consolation” is a wistful imagining, not a real experience.
“Float” also carries an ambiguous charge. In its immediate context, it suggests angels and disembodied spirits. But normally Whitman floats in oceans and ponds – in the eroticized embrace of the water. He also seems to identify “float” as a kind of cosmic atmosphere in which the world is nourished. Whitman associates floating with lively happiness but also with death. Death also haunts “Primeval my love,” where he describes the athletic reality as “last.” He may be contrasting it with the primeval, first love for a woman (“primeval” comes from the Latin for “first age”) – as if he had evolved from a more physical love to a final, more spiritual stage. But “last” reality also evokes death, as if this love is occurring after death or in a state resembling death.