Among the men and women, the multitude
Whom does the poem address: an acolyte, a reader, or a lover? The word “divine” suggests that the poet is a prophet or god. The prizing of the poet over parent, wife, husband, brother, child echoes Jesus’ injunction: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” But people sometimes favor lovers – not just prophets – over their families, and Whitman starts the second stanza by addressing his “lover and perfect equal” – not his readers or “élèves.”
Whitman’s disjunctive use of time makes the poem even more puzzling. In stanza one, he perceives the lover picking him out and praises the lover for “knowing” him, and in line five, he says, in the past tense, that he “meant” for the lover to discover him. But in the final line he suddenly puts their meeting in the future: “I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.” Now, it is unclear whether they have met yet. Perhaps the poem takes place in the instant that Whitman notices a man looking at him longingly and “knowing” him with his gaze – or in the instant that the poet gazes back and discovers the signs of adhesiveness. Or perhaps it takes place in a literary utopia, where the special reader comes to understand Whitman’s secret signs, at which point the poet begins to “read” the reader back. The reader finds Whitman gazing out of the poems and feels loved, understood, and discovered.
Whitman does not describe the secret and divine signs, but other poems suggest that they relate to manly attachment. In “Starting from Paumanok” he vows to “let flame” the burning fires that had been too long kept down, to give them complete abandonment and write the “evangel-poem of comrades and of love,” explicitly linking love to divinity. Furthermore, it is not just an individual lover who is divine (“he, adhesive, kissing me so long with his daily kiss,”) it is also strangers (“the Gods, my unknown lovers).”
Even assuming that the secret and divine signs concern manly attachment, we still do not know what they are. They may be signs that radiate out from Whitman’s person – signs that a person properly attuned can pick out in a crowd. They may be signs he does not make himself, but that divinity makes on him. They may be poems, or esoteric elements within poems, that properly attuned readers can divine, as true disciples can decipher the parables of a prophet or god.
Certainly, Whitman loves indirection. As he writes in the poem “Laws For Creations,” “All works shall illustrate the divine law of indirections.” As Whitman writes in “A Thought on Shakespeare,” “The best poetic utterance, after all, can merely hint, or remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught of real perfection, or the solution of any deep problem, or completed statement of the moral, the true, the beautiful, eludes the greatest, deftest poet – flies away like an always uncaught bird.”
For Whitman, the pretense of completeness is inherently dogmatic and authoritarian. For a writer or prophet to attune himself to nature, democracy, religion, and love, he must embrace “suggestiveness,” leaving it to the reader to co-create the work as a “lover and perfect equal.”
The word “faint,” while it means hardly perceptible, also means weak, dizzy, prone to fainting; cowardly, lacking strength or vigor; and accomplished languidly. To proceed by “faint indirections” is contrary to Whitman’s usual stance as the brave rough, celebrating himself and boldly assuming that he shares everything with his reader.