Full of life, sweet-blooded, compact, visible
This is the last poem in Calamus, but it was not the last poem written. Whitman wrote a close-to-final draft of it two years earlier, perhaps on his birthday, in 1857, calling himself “thirty-eight years old the eighty-first year of The States.” It is another poem about the love between author and reader. Whitman describes himself four ways in the opening line (full of life, sweet-blooded, compact, and visible) and then uses two of those four ways (compact and visible) to describe his future reader in the sixth line.
In three earlier Calamus poems, Whitman refers to blood, linking it with confession, secrecy, and homoeroticism. Thus, the phrase “sweet-blooded” does more than celebrate Whitman’s healthiness and benevolence; it also reminds the reader of the secret, “scarlet” life that pulses under his skin.
“Compact” would seem an odd choice of words unless we knew it from other Whitman poems. As an adjective, “compact” means short-bodied, solid, and without excess flesh. In 1855, Whitman described himself as six feet tall, “a good feeder,” and “ample limbed,” so he was not – physically – particularly compact. “Compact” also means “not diffuse or verbose.” Of all the praise that Whitman’s poetry has earned, no one has ever called it compact. More important for him, perhaps, were some of the meanings of “compact” as a verb (to make up by connecting or combining, to knit or draw together) and a noun (an agreement or covenant).
It may seem strange for Whitman to stress that he is “visible,” since the reader is unlikely to think that he is invisible, but he uses the word three times in this very short poem. The Calamus poems confront the risk that the poet’s self may be an apparition or illusion. In stressing that he is visible now but will become invisible, Whitman reiterates his faith that his bodily experience is good, meaningful and visible to others, and that he will persist as an immaterial soul and poetical presence after his body becomes compost. By emphasizing his visibility, he also emphasizes that it cannot be taken for granted: there is a perpetual risk of becoming – or at least feeling like – a ghost.
Whitman confidently addresses a reader born a century, or any number of centuries hence. “When you read these,” he tells the reader, “I . . . am become invisible.” The principle meaning is, of course, that he has died in the intervening years. But this phrase may also mean that the act of reading makes the author invisible. Whitman has a great gift for making himself physically present in his poems, attracting and embracing the reader. But in this poem he emphasizes that the reader must take his place, must become compact and visible, rather than hiding or being obscured by the poet’s long shadow. The reader is the one to “realize” the poems, which means to understand them, but also to make them real, to bring them into existence. It is not Whitman, but the act of seeking him, that makes the poems real; it is the compact between poet and reader that produces the poem.
In addition to seeking Whitman, the reader must fancy how happy he would be, if the poet could be with him and become his lover. The main meaning of “fancy” here is simply “imagine,” but the word carries many other connotations. “Fancy” also means “the power of conception and representation used in artistic expression (as by a poet),” and this was a frequent usage among poets in the nineteenth century, including Whitman. Late in his life he used “Good-bye My Fancy” as the title for a poem, a collection of essays, and a group of 35 poems he added as an annex to Leaves of Grass. In asking the reader to “fancy” something, Whitman is asking the reader to use his imagination as the poet does – to fancy that Whitman is with him as his lover. Through this imaginary loving union, the reader becomes the co-creator of the poetry.
To “fancy” someone is to have an amorous fondness for him; so the word itself unites poetic imagination with love. To “fancy” is also to make a leap of faith, to believe without being certain, or even to believe mistakenly; and a “fancy” can mean a “liking formed by caprice, rather than by reason.” Thus, a fancy is a whim, of the sort Emerson means when he writes: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” Finally, “fancy” can mean ornamental, swank, posh, or extravagant, reminding the reader that Whitman, for all his praise of plain things, also had a taste for opera, theater, and extravagant self-expression.
Whitman, never shy about making assertions, does not assert that he is with the reader. Instead, he advises, “Be not too certain but I am with you now.” Embedded within this sentence is the broader command, “Be not too certain.” Rather, learn to live with poetic ambiguity; learn to live with and become one with your fancy. The poem, which starts on such an earthy note (“full of life, sweet-blooded”) ends in the subjunctive mode: “be it as if I were with you.” Poetry, and love, live in the as if. We are perpetually “unborn,” peering out at the world, wondering how to become real, how to “realize” the visions that we see.