Not heaving from my ribbed breast only
Considering that the previous poem, “States!,” portrays adhesiveness as the mystic glue that will hold the nation together, it is surprising how adhesiveness manifests itself in this poem – in sighs, rage, broken vows, hungry wishes, defiances, and husky pantings through clenched teeth.
Adhesiveness is the “pulse of his life.” Pulse is a symbol of life, but one closely connected to death (checking for a pulse to see if someone has died), and he evokes death with the phrase “dead words” and the mention that his heart “one day will cease.” Pulse is vital but intermittent, like ocean waves, coming and going. Adhesion does not necessarily mean being permanently glued together, it may mean being a dissatisfied and solitary lover.
We can interpret the final lines two ways. In one reading, adhesiveness shows itself most urgently in the list of phenomena Whitman has just provided, and he is praying to have it show itself just as urgently in his poems. In a quite contrary reading, however, adhesiveness is exactly what is missing from the phenomena listed, and Whitman needs its presence in both the phenomena and the songs. Adhesiveness may be present or absent, or it may be both, like a wave or a pulse surging and then retreating. Put another way, adhesiveness is present in Whitman, but present in the form of a wish, dream, or desire, manifesting itself in a heaving from his breast: a breath, sigh, cry, or song.
Adhesiveness is present, or is longed for, in the “subtle nourishment of the air.” The word “subtle” can mean many things: delicate, elusive, obscure, perceptive, refined, ingenious; artful, crafty, or insidious. In the King James Bible, the serpent is “more subtil than any beast of the field” when it encourages Adam and Eve to break their oath to God and eat from the tree of knowledge. Whitman sometimes feels similarly subtle in encouraging us to know adhesion, with all its half-suppressed eroticism.
If “subtle” is ambiguous, so is “air,” which can mean the earth’s atmosphere or a song, an “aria.” Whitman finds or seeks adhesiveness in the subtle natural, cultural, and social atmospheres that surround him as well as in his own music, his “sounded and resounded words.”
At times Whitman dreams that adhesiveness will fulfill the desire and put an end to the lack, whether through satisfaction or sublimation. At other times, as in this poem, he suggests that to have the cosmic force he yearns for – a power strong enough to bind a nation – adhesion must deploy the magnetism of erotic love, even if, paradoxically, that means separation and dissatisfaction. The force that will “compact the states” more strongly than an “agreement on paper” is the same force that erupts in oaths and promises broken.
The active verb in this long and convoluted sentence is “need,” but Whitman delays its appearance until the final line. He activates the poem, however, by using verb forms in nearly every line: words like “heaving,” “beating,” “pounding,” and “chattering.” Many of the words he chooses evoke voicing or attempts at voicing. With its tortuous syntax and negative framing, the poem enacts Whitman’s struggle to heave his feelings out and shape them into something more than non-verbal sighs, oaths broken, and dead words: something that he finally reaches in the last word of the poem: “songs.” For the songs to be true, they must differ from the “standards hitherto published;” they must incorporate and yet transcend the sighs and husky pantings.