I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing
Throughout the cluster, Whitman employs vegetative images for poetry, such as calamus leaves, calamus roots, scented herbage, tomb-leaves, prairie grass, and blood blossoms. Here he uses “leaves” four times and twice describes the tree as “uttering” leaves, leaving no doubt about the analogy of the tree’s leaves with his poems. The live-oak is “rude, unbending, lusty;” it sounds like one of Whitman’s imperious, macho self-portraits. But here he uses that image as a foil. The tree reminds him of manly love by virtue of what it is not. Where in other poems he portrays himself as a self-reliant fertility god, here he cannot utter joyous leaves without a lover near.
Whitman leaves open the question of what kind of love he is describing. In the first instance, he wonders how the tree could utter leaves without “its” friend, “its” lover near, making it sound like a single, specific other tree, a “mate.” But then he switches to the plural: “dear friends.” Lastly, the oak is uttering leaves without “a” friend or “a” lover near. So the joy of Whitman’s life, or the muse of his poetry, may be a singular friend, a circle of close friends, or a succession of friends and lovers.
In the late 1850s, Whitman seems to have experienced erotic passions (Harry Vaughan and possibly others), ardent friendships in close circles (the bohemians of Pfaff’s and the “Fred Gray Association”), and camaraderie with intellectuals and working men. Some aspect of those experiences seems reflected in the lovely parenthetical “(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them)” and, more generally, in the high valuation that the Calamus poems put on love – in Whitman’s growing intuition that he has found something more important than his poetic mission or that he has found a key, secret or acknowledged, to that mission.
In “These I, singing in spring” Whitman plucks “tokens” and distributes them – pinks, laurel leaves, sage, calamus roots and other plants, including moss from a Florida live-oak. In “I saw in Louisiana” he plucks a souvenir for himself and keeps it in his room. He creates his token carefully – breaks off a twig with a “certain number of leaves upon it” and twines around it a little moss – making it a microcosm of the tree and the poem. The “twining” of the moss makes it a token of adhesion, reminiscent of the “twisting” and “intertwisting” in other Calamus poems.
The token is “curious.” Whitman’s tokens – his leaves, poems, prophecies, meanings – are curious in many ways: odd (spurning timid models), viewed as curiosities by others, but also curious themselves: embodiments of his curiosity and openness. Unlike crude allegories or magical amulets that work only one spell, his tokens, or answers, provoke multiple, unending questions. Rather than simply existing, like inanimate objects, dead words on a page, they pulse like blood, coming and going.
The l sounds in the poem make their own little cluster, intertwisting the words “live,” “life,” “leaves,” “love,” “lover,” “look,” “lusty,” “believe,” “lately,” “little,” and “Louisiana.”
Whitman believes that love is integral to life and to his leaves, but whereas previously it had been important to him to exhibit himself as a rude, unbending, lusty, phallic male, now the twig serves to remind him that he is not self-reliant. If you pretend to be a live-oak, you run the risk of finding yourself a snapped-off twig on a shelf. True knowing – to know very well – means to know another person, and not just your self – and to experience that knowing in a passing moment in time, to understand that we are no longer in Eden; we are not gods but humans; we are belated; we live “lately.”