Poets of Passion:
The Erotic Imaginings of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
The
Latin term for “desire” is cupido. Cupid, in Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, is the son of Venus,
goddess of love. He is a handsome young
male god who falls in love with the maiden Psyche. Defying his jealous mother, he carries her off to a secluded
palace, where he visits only at night—unseen and unrecognized. One night, her curiosity gets the better of
her and she takes a peek at his lamp-lit sleeping face. He wakes, enraged, and abandons her. She wanders for many years in search of him
until their final reunion upon heavenly Olympus.
The preceding (somewhat tangential) look into the
roots of the modern conception of desire affords a number of insights
concerning humanity’s relationship with the force termed “desire.” Desire springs from love, that ever-elusive
term meant to connote the pervasive indefinable urge for one to join with
another. Desire’s desire is the mind
(the psyche), its opposite—desire is wild, a youth capriciously shooting
mind-bending arrows; the mind houses reason and, ultimately, the only means by
which desire can function in the world.
However, desire prefers to remain undisclosed, pent up in that dark
realm saturated with unknowing, the unconscious mind. When the mind gazes upon its wantonness, its desire, there is a
sudden repulsion and fragmentation. In
psychoanalytic terms, this translates as the ego forever on a cusp between full
engagement of desire—love in its best forms, excessive libidinal behavior in
its worst—and an allegiance to restriction, moderation, reason, and form. It is a psychical dance that never ends
(except, perhaps, when we dream), and no two people dance in the same fashion,
which makes the world the wonderful and bizarre place it is.
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are very different dancers. Their relationships with desire inform the totality of their beings. The poets, aside from being drawn by desire to create (and we cannot forget that Cupid’s Greek counterpart, Eros, was, in early mythology, a love god born of chaos, embodying harmony and the creative power of the universe), they communicate desire through their poetry, turning their psyches and the page into vessels for unsatisfied urges. Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” (249) and the eleventh section of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” express in erotic tones a sense of longing, of a self in some way exiled from his or her desire. The different ways desire is fulfilled in their poems reflect an essential difference between the poets’ lives, styles, and forms.
“Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” is a frequent candidate for
the position of Dickinson’s most erotic poem.
“Wild” insinuates abandon, a loss of self-control; night, of course, is
the time when society’s gaze and, along with it, one’s conscience fade. Never one to skirt a subject, Dickinson
proclaims at once her speaker’s desire, the exclamation point making the song a
forceful utterance, not just mere exposition.
This utterance is directed at a particular individual (an unnamed “thee”)
who is absent, for the first stanza is in the hypothetical form—a wish. Should the wish to be with the other be
fulfilled, “Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” Dickinson would have known that luxury is more than sumptuous
living; it implies rankness and excess, luxuria. It is doubtful Dickinson means for the
desired night to entail only extended conversation and the ingestion of sweet
Portuguese wine. The speaker in the
second stanza declares the idealization of being with the other: Winds are futile to “a Heart in port” (in a
place of anchorage and shelter), which no longer has use for the compass or the
chart, or any other tools required to traveled towards a destination; once the
final destination has been reached, their worth is done. The final stanza affirms the notion that
being with an erotically desired other is akin to a magnificent and heavenly
end, as the rhythm and suggestions become even more sexually charged while
conveying a sense of tranquility. “Ah,
the Sea!” sighs the speaker in imagining the pleasures of “Rowing in Eden,”
which connote the physics of the sexual act and the earthly paradise its
enactment reprises. Using the word
“Eden” instead of “Heaven” or even the more general “Paradise” makes clear the
poet intends the song to be about physical human pleasure. The poem is an address, made clear in the
final two lines, which are both inquisitive and demanding: “Might I but
moor—Tonight— / In Thee!” There is no
question mark, and the interjection of an urgent “Tonight” adds to the
excessive exigency. The speaker
wishes soft anchorage that’s nearly divine, but is separated from such an
achievement. The absence of the other
forces abstinence onto the speaker, who, during the night, can only dream
instead of act. Dickinson plays with
layered metaphors and suggestions, which is why those interpretations that deny
any erotic nature in the poem merit some credence. Nevertheless, the poem is direct; the essential meaning—a call to
a lover to join the speaker immediately for an intimate, energetic, and
heavenly evening—is obvious. The erotic
energy running beneath the lines is itself a release, the writing (and reading)
of the charged lines creating its own “Wild Night.”
Walt
Whitman, in such poems as those in the “Children of Adam” cluster, has little
reservation over expressing eroticism in an overt fashion. He seems less willing in earlier poems, such
as “Song of Myself,” to engage sexual desire in anything other than an
idealized or metaphorical manner. The
eleventh section of “Song of Myself” almost reads as an answer to the figure in
Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!”
Whitman’s speaker is a removed observer, keeping with the omnipresent
self that the song proclaims. It offers
a dramatic vignette: “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore” (199) as a
lonesome woman watches. She is the
embodiment of refined prudence, owning a “fine house by the rise of the bank”
where she “hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window”
(202-3). Like the speaker, she is an
observer, which insinuates a projected connection between these selves—defined
identities seeking sexual release through conjoining with another. The large number of sexual objects
(unidentified young men) so near the symbolic sea of unconsciousness suggests
that fulfilling desire involves a loss of identity. Just as the speaker projects into the lady, so the lady projects
herself splashing among the young men, all the while staying “stock still in
your room” (207). She remains locked in
the sterile luxury of self-control, all the while imagining yet avoiding the luxuria of sexual fulfillment. Only her “unseen hand” tremblingly descend
“over their bodies” (212)—her desires realized through fantasy—as the bathers
float unaware, unconscious of their observers and their own sexuality. Unlike Dickinson in “Wild Nights—Wild
Nights!” Whitman transforms sexual longing into a comment on the sad
restrictions the overly prudent and self-aware ego places on itself in the face
of sexual wish-fulfillment.
Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!”
features desires that are never fulfilled.
The speaker is a solitary, longing self addressing an absent love-object
in the lyrical form. Whitman, in
contrast, often plays with the Self in dramatic form, since drama lends itself
to an encompassment of others’ longing and fulfillment. The detached observer can comment on
self-imposed loneliness; the longing self only seeks and calls out to its
missing anchorage. The eleventh section
of “Song of Myself” is, like Dickinson’s poem only an imagining, however. Sexual fulfillment in both poems is akin to
wading in the selfless sea. Dickinson
keeps the effects of desire to herself, or a first-person narrator,
transforming erotic urges into a metaphysical yearning, whereas Whitman
projects his speaker’s urges through drama, the living manifestation of the his
cosmic Self. Both poets, interestingly,
seem to have remarkably similar relationships with erotic desire—that is,
unrequited—yet they achieve their expression, which is its own form of
fulfillment, in extremely different ways, reflecting the very different lives
the two poets led. The speaker-ego is
restricted (either by its own choosing or by circumstance) and pulls away from
desire in some form (either sublimation of projection), left only to imagine
its yearning being satisfied in some form of immersion. The imagining, though, provides its own
satisfaction, connecting the poets with readers in a psychic sea of artistic
rapture.
—
S. Parker
6 December 2001
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