Sometimes with one I love
This is the one Calamus poem that Whitman improved in future editions of Leaves of Grass. Here is the superior 1867 version:
Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I
effuse unreturn’d love;
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love – the pay is certain,
one way or another;
(I loved a certain person ardently, and my love was not return’d;
Yet out of that, I have written these songs.)
The first two lines are unchanged (except for an apostrophe); but the third and fourth line are more pithy, moving, and revealing. In general, Whitman’s revisions made him less frail, exposed, and homoerotic; here, however, his Muse led him back to the calamus root.
The poet is “with” the one he loves, which suggests his physical presence. The one Whitman loves is not someone who requited his love but then rejected him; he seems, rather, to be a friend who likes the poet but does not love him passionately.
What is fascinating, particularly in the 1867 version, is the importance Whitman ascribes to unrequited love. Out of “that,” he says, he has written “these songs.” As so often, he leaves his pronouns ambiguous. We do not know if “that” refers to his ardent love, the non-requital of it, or both. In the 1860 version things are clearer: it is freely giving himself to comrades, regardless of requital, that inspires his art. In the 1867 version the experience of non-requital looms larger, making art a compensation for loss more than a result of outflowing love.
We do not know if “these” songs are (i) the Calamus poems about unrequited love; (ii) the Calamus poems about the certain person; (iii) all the Calamus poems; or (iv) some greater number of Leaves of Grass poems, perhaps even all of them. Poets write – in part – because they want to be loved. Sometimes they write poems addressed to a certain person, attempting to inflame love. Sometimes, spurned by a certain person, they write beautiful laments, hoping that other people will be moved and fall in love with them. Sometimes, unhappy in romantic love, they seek compensation in the love of readers, present and future.
“Sometimes with one I love” suggests that Whitman could not have written the Calamus poems without the experience of unrequited love. The formerly majestic, god-like, self-reliant poet of “Song of Myself” experienced not just desire but the “need” of comrades, the nights and days with them, the joys and pains, the intertwisting and twining, and so he realized the power of adhesiveness. Paradoxically, just as we value life most in the presence of death, we may value love most in its absence; and adhesiveness may be felt most strongly in the hours long, sore, and heavy-hearted.
Love is a precious fluid or a magnetic, electrical charge. We effuse it and hope that it flows back to us. When it does not – at least not in the form we had hoped – we are tempted to fill ourselves, instead, with rage. Our systems demand some form of reciprocity, one passion for another. The rage, according to Whitman, is self-generated, and it stems from fear. In Calamus, he discovers that he can fill himself with poetry instead of rage, and that he can transmute an individual passion into a generalized love that he effuses toward his readers and countrymen, among whom he seeks to “infuse” himself. Throughout many Calamus poems, he has emphasized the importance of reciprocity; but now, late in the sequence, he abandons the dream of perfect reciprocity and accepts unrequited love as a foundational human experience, essential to the great poet.