He found, like all men find, that you can't really merge in a woman, though you may go a long way. You can't manage the last bit. So you have to give it up, and try elsewhere. If you insist on merging.
In Calamus he changes his tune. He doesn't shout and thump and exult any more. He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful.
The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the intervention of woman, the female.
So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades. Over and over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love. Out of this manly love will come the inspiration for the future.
Will it though? Will it?
Comradeship! Comrades! This is to be the new Democracy: of Comrades. This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship.
Is it? Are you sure?
It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in Drum Taps. It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative activity. And it is extreme and alone, touching the confines of death. Something terrible to bear, terrible to be responsible for. Even Walt Whitman felt it. The soul's last and most poignant responsibility, the responsibility of comradeship, of manly love.
"Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots, you
make me think of death.
Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally
beautiful except death and love?)
I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of
lovers, I think it must be for death,
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the
atmosphere of lovers,
Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to
prefer
(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death
most)
Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely
the same as you mean——"
This is strange, from the exultant Walt.