What Is the Grass by Mark Doty

Author:Mark Doty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

WHILE NO ONE WOULD WANT to read a lot of that, there’s something engaging about seeing Whitman tumble over himself, his thinking snarled up in qualifications, in this lurching, going-nowhere tumble. What calms this restless barrage is love; the speaker’s anxieties come to rest when he whom I love travels with me. Nation-founding ambitions are set aside, the speaker’s desires salved:

—I am satisfied,

He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

That line, the final one of “Calamus” 7, is a quiet bombshell. It marks the appearance of love for one person in Whitman’s work. Read within the chronology of the poet’s attachments, he who has satisfied the speaker would seem to be Fred Vaughan. I like knowing this because I want to know Whitman more closely, having been so won by the poems, but the identity of the lover doesn’t matter really, concerned as “Calamus” is with illuminating singular, archetypal moments in the experience of love, placing them into a chain that acknowledges their radicalism, inscribing a letter sent into the future:

To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,

To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.

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