You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as
of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste,
matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only
nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take
of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake
at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
*Constance Merritt comments:
There is the all-encompassing Whitman, container of multitudes,
wandering, restless, appetitive, sprawling, desperate to be everywhere,
everything, everyone (There was a child went forth every day, / And the
first object he look'd upon, that object he became...) -- is fragmentation
the end of such desire? wholeness? -- , anywhere but here within the
prison of the self (And you O my soul where you stand, / Surrounded,
detached, in measureless oceans of space...) and a quieter, self-
possessed, concentrated Whitman, who speaks with such poignancy and
clarity of loneliness and longing:
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark
green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not...
And yet (solitary in a wide flat space, / Uttering joyous leaves all its
life without a friend a lover near) he does precisely that, the thing he
knows very well that he could not. And yet one feels that I could not,
the dislocating wrench between the soul's deepest necessity and the
accidents that condition a life.
Founded on the bedrock of human estrangement, "To a Stranger" approaches
this universal problem not through imaginative merging, a penchant for
which D. H. Lawrence takes Whitman to task, but rather through a vision
of mutual recognition. The moment of encounter is pregnant, an
unprepossessing acorn opening out into a glorious oak, a moment which not
only extends future promises, but also one that heals the past, the
passing stranger recalling the speaker to a life of joy already lived. A
life before the schism of gender, before and beyond the compensatory
couplings of sex, a life at once redolent of the uncompromising
innocence of childhood and the sensual and spiritual ripenings of age
(fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured). And note how Whitman's syntax
enacts reciprocity at every turn and the delicate balance between
restraint, passive receptiveness, and active willing (I am to see to it
that I do not lose you) struck in those last three lines. In "To a
Stranger" Whitman figures a way of both losing and finding the self.
Finding through mutual recognition: we can only hope to know ourselves
through another's eyes; becoming is always and only in relation. And
losing because in relation one no longer stands apart (surrounded,
detached in measureless oceans of space...), but rather becomes a part
of something entirely new and larger than the self and is thereby healed
of (quoting Randall Jarrell) "that long disease" the self.
CONSTANCE MERRITT, author of *A Protocol for Touch* (University of
North Texas Press, 2000), lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.
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