Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted
The last words in “Long I thought” are “We never separate again.” In “Hours continuing long,” however, Whitman reveals that while hours continue long, love does not: “for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content myself without me.” This complicated syntax reflects two things: first, Whitman’s difficulty in speaking about homoerotic love, which often leads to strange and labored phrasing; and second, the importance he places on reciprocity.
“Hours” tells a specific story of unrequited love – the first clearly unrequited love in Calamus – and enacts that story through a series of ten questions (there is no period – no full rest – in the poem). Whereas in “Of the terrible question of appearances,” love resolves, or makes irrelevant, Whitman’s skepticism about reality, here love has the opposite effect, isolating him and making him wonder whether anyone in the whole world feels as he does, making him lose himself in dejection.
In “In paths untrodden,” the poet escapes – one afternoon – to an isolated pond to celebrate the need of comrades; and in “Whoever you are” he proposes escaping to a hidden spot with the lover/reader. Now he withdraws again, but the hour is dusk, the spot is lonesome, and the poet hides his face in his hands. The country roads and city streets, so often the backdrops for camaraderie, joy, and erotic flirtation in Whitman, are now the sites for lonely rambles deep in the night. The passing hours, which will prove so delightful in “When I heard at the close of day,” when he is expecting his lover’s arrival, bring nothing but torment when he is forgotten but – in another failure of reciprocity – cannot forget.
The poet is no prophet or fertility god – just a lonely, rejected man. He says, “I am what I am,” which echoes what God says to Moses, but the phrase could not be more deflationary, as it follows after “I am ashamed – but it is useless.” Being spurned makes the poet so shrink in on himself that he wonders if other men ever feel the same – forgetting, in his despair, that unrequited love is a near universal experience. Whitman, who opened his career with “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” has seen his ego shrink from the size of the earth to the size of a pea.