O you whom I often and silently come where you are
This is the shortest poem in Calamus (one sentence, three lines, 49 words) and one of the few in which Whitman directly addresses someone he loves as “you” and tells him that he loves him. The words are simple (41 with one syllable, six with two, and two with three), but the syntax, especially in the first line, is complicated and not quite grammatical. The “whom” in the first line is stranded; it is not the object of any verb or preposition; perhaps it mimics the elusiveness of the beloved person Whitman dares not embrace.
The music of the poem comes from its rhythms and assonance: the near rhyme of “little” and “subtle” and the sibilance of “side,” “sit,” “same,” “subtle,” and “sake.”
Whitman experiences many different kinds of silence in Calamus, whether seething with despair, exchanging yearning glances with strangers, or joyfully embracing his beloved. In this poem, out of shyness, fear of rejection, or reluctance to admit homoerotic passion, the poet remains quiet, except in a poem which, paradoxically, breaks the silence. Perhaps the beloved will read it, recognize himself, and realize the poet’s love, or perhaps the beloved will never see it, but Whitman’s many readers will. In either case, “O you” illustrates the thesis of “Sometimes with one I love,” as the poet receives a poem in recompense for his unrequited love. The first two lines of the poem end with “you,” but the last line ends with “me,” as the focus shifts from the beloved to the poet.
“Subtle” can mean many things: delicate, elusive, obscure, perceptive, refined, skillful, ingenious, artful, crafty, or operating insidiously (like the serpent in Eden). The electric fire that plays within Whitman in this poem, and throughout Calamus, is “subtle” in all these senses. There is an elusive electricity in the air – there is an erotic charge to all of life, and it animates Whitman’s ingenious poetry – but when it takes the form of homoeroticism, it becomes secretive, suspect, and dangerous.
Whitman’s use of the word “electric” draws on the then-popular “science” of mesmerism. The Viennese doctor Franz Mesmer claimed that all phenomena were linked by an electrical ether or fluid, and certain people could use that force to “magnetize” other people into a trance. Whitman was a believer: in 1842, he wrote in the New York Sunday Times that mesmerism revealed a “whole new world of truth, grand, fearful, profound, relating to that great mystery, in the shadow of which we live and move and have our being.”
In the 1855 poem later titled “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman writes of the human body and soul in mesmeric terms. The bodies of men and women engirth him, and he must respond and “charge them with the charge of the Soul.” “Mad filaments” and “ungovernable shoots,” he says, “play” out of the female body. His imagery becomes explicit and ejaculatory, as he goes on to describe “limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous . . . white-blow and delirious juice.”
The electric charge in “O you whom I often” is much more subtle, but still it manifests in “fire” – that is to say, in passion, not just the cool nonchalance of camaraderie.. The word “playing” in the final line is surprising; we might expect the fire to be “burning” “smoldering,” or “flaming.” “Playing” evokes the lightning flashes of the electric current, but it also, like the word “boys” in “We two boys together clinging,” indicates a more innocent, pre-sexual kind of attraction. “Play” contrasts with “real,” suggesting that the love will remain shadowy and unconsummated; but it also suggests some the joyful, “athletic” quality that Whitman finds in male love.