Foreword
Now Whitman explores what it feels like to touch, to really touch. The twentieth-century poet Karl Shapiro called this section “one of the greatest moments of poetry,” as Whitman takes us through a shimmering cascade of sensual images that are at once sexually explicit and maddeningly vague. Every moment of touch, Whitman suggests, “quivers us to a new identity,” as our sense receptors respond to the provocative stimuli of the world that are constantly redefining who we are as we feel the flames of sensual contact rush through our veins. This passage has been read as a description of homosexual passion, masturbation, and/or heterosexual intercourse. The vagueness creates a charged sexual field in which any act of intense touch can be imagined. When touch is fully activated, the “fellow-senses” slide away, and we give ourselves over to the charged interpenetration of body with body. We can never be quite sure who the “prurient provokers” are who “stiffen my limbs” and “graze at the edges of me,” like mouths devouring the very edges of identity. We sense that the other body so completely in touch with our own “is hardly different from myself”: the moment is simultaneously mystical and physical, as touch allows us a glimpse of being that seems out-of-body precisely because it has so fully heightened the sensitivity of every inch of our flesh to a body not our own.
Whitman captures the way that intense erotic experience creates sensations of torture and rapture, as if we are dying in the most heightened moment of living. The “prurient provokers” are described as “straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,” and this wildly conflated image genitalizes the heart (just as in Section 5), merging the conventional seat of emotions with the sexual organs. The male phallic imagery here is rendered, surprisingly, in female nurturant terms, as the “udder” is squeezed until it releases its milk or semen. We seem to be slipping between metaphor and metonymy here: the heart is not so much a metaphor for the penis as it is part of a metonymic system, a circuit of excited blood pumped from the heart to the stiffening sexual organ and, through capillaries webbed throughout the body, to the surface of the eroticized skin. There’s a reason the heart beats faster during sex.
The sexual excitement brings the poet finally to “a headland,” to a precipice over a vast ocean, to the point where the solid land meets the liquid sea, where the body confronts dissolution, where whatever protective devices we have for the self (our “sentries”) “desert” us and leave us “helpless to a red marauder.” Whatever this “red marauder” is (an engorged sexual organ?, a wild Indian?, any blood-drenched pillager?), the body is helpless to defend itself, and the poet experiences himself taken over. It is as if the body—which normally defines us and protects our boundaries, distinguishing what is “me” from what is “not me”—has betrayed us, has become a “traitor.” Just as in Section 26, when the poet felt himself lose his breath when he was overwhelmed by the opera , so now the poet feels his breath “tight in its throat,” as if he is about to die into this moment of ecstasy, ready to surrender himself to this invasion of his body as touch threatens to open the “floodgates” and allow the invading stimuli to engulf it. Seldom has language taken us on such an intimate journey through the familiar and yet miraculous experience of sexual touch.
Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity, Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself, On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs, Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, Depriving me of my best as for a purpose, Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture- fields, Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me, No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger, Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while, Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me. The sentries desert every other part of me, They have left me helpless to a red marauder, They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me. I am given up by traitors, I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor, I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there. You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat, Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.
Afterword
The sentries on the headland, bearing witness to the tribulations of a man caught up in the throes of passion—who or what are they? These vivid figures from Whitman’s erotic imagination, this herd of animal spirits leading him to a lover or to himself, these provokers (within and without) who betray with kisses and caresses, unmask the poet, “quivering [him] to a new identity.” He is carried off on a surge of feeling to an imagined promontory by the sea, and there, “helpless to a red marauder,” he becomes everyone and no one. Ah, touch… How easily we are deceived! How we long for the villainous pleasures of human contact, even with the sentries keeping watch—the inhibitions, personal and collective, that stand in the way of our true happiness.
Among the more provocative statements made by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was his claim, in a review-essay on Constantine Cavafy, that ninety per cent of the best lyric poetry is written post-coitum—a figure derived, presumably, from his experience, reading, and, perhaps, the anecdotal evidence of his friends. (Hard to imagine devising, much less filling out, a survey that would generate reliable data on the work habits of poets!) In this section Whitman seems to be writing in the immediate aftermath of sex, if not in the act itself; hence the mélange of strange images—flesh and blood transformed into lightning, the udder of his heart, his senses grazing at the edges of the self. For his “Song of Myself” now requires the dissolution of the self, the union and scattering of its atoms over the sentries, the headland, and the sea—la petit mort, the French euphemism for orgasm: the little death. I is everywhere.
—CM
Question
Is the experience of touch that Whitman describes here specific enough that you can relate it to particular experiences you have had? Or is it general enough that it could describe virtually any intense experience of touching someone or something? Which of his images do you find particularly evocative and why?