Here my last words, and the most baffling
It is not obvious which words Whitman is calling his “last.” This is not the last poem in Leaves of Grass or even in Calamus, so it does not seem that he is referring only to this poem. He may be indicating the whole Calamus cluster: the poems in which he claims that he will tell us the secret of his nights and days but that there is something terrible that he dares not put into words. However ambiguous, they are his “last words” in the sense of being his most important confession.
By calling them “leaves,” Whitman invites us to compare the “frail” Calamus poems to the rest of Leaves of Grass. To be frail is to be easily broken or destroyed; easily led into evil; slight or insubstantial; or physically weak. The Calamus poems are short and slight compared to other Whitman poems, especially his most famous long poems; they are less “substantial” because of their more personal, lyrical bent and (sometime) disavowal of a bardic role; and they are shadowed by a sense of serpentine sin. They portray the poet, and humanity in general, as ethically, spiritually, and physically frail, as in “Not heaving from my ribbed breast only,” with its sighs, cries, and broken oaths. Often, he appears to himself as nothing more than a “shadow likeness.” Unlike the fertility god, triumphant bard, or macho “rough,” the poet in Calamus can be weak, receptive, and dependent on the love of others for his contentment.
These leaves are the frailest, and yet they are they are the “longest” and “strongest” lasting. Whitman stakes a claim for Calamus as his most vital, enduring work, not in spite of its frailty but because of it. In Calamus he “shades down and hides” his thoughts, afraid of “exposing” himself indecently. He relies more on ambiguity and symbolism, and he emphasizes feelings over thoughts. His lyrical feelings about love, friendship, and death “cast into the shade” his more didactic pronouncements.
The most common source of shade on a hot day is a tree. Shade is what leaves do for humans. By contrast, to “expose” a human baby means to abandon it to its death; to “expose” people’s secrets is to injure them; to “expose” a person to illness or danger is wrong and indecent. To “shade down” thoughts is to not just to darken them; it is also to relieve (re-leaf) them and help them flourish. Once thoughts have been shaded down, then they can be “exposed” in the positive sense: brought to light, made known, exhibited for public veneration, displayed, offered for sale to a willing public.
Whitman does not expose himself; rather, his poems expose him. That helps to explain why he can claim that his Calamus poems are the frailest and yet strongest-lasting: because he has allowed his poems to dominate and overshadow his conscious, intentional self and thus reveal his frailty. Instead of pulling poems into service of his bardic program, he has let the poems pull him into service of their lyrical mission: to say indirectly what he cannot say directly.