pieruccm

After reading the remainder of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, I can’t help but notice that the section beginning on 118 and ending on 124 is perhaps the most sexually charged section of all of them, yet not all references are “dirty” ones; some I believe are a sincere expression of wonderment of the body in general.

In the very first couple of sections, Whitman talks about the bodies of men and women as “perfect,” which then he so aptly follows up with “The strong, sweet supple quality he has strikes through the cotton and flannel” (118) as a description of just how one is to know the perfectness of a man’s body other than his face. Is Whitman not referring to a man’s penis here? What else could possibly “strike through” the fabric of his trousers other than a hardened penis? However, the sex references do not end there, for sure.

Moving onto when Whitman describes the body of a female (as well as the importance of it), I noticed that he  claims “A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot” (120)  in regards to her form. I did not know the meaning of the word “nimbus” and so I looked it up on Merriam-Webster online and basically it refers to a luminous cloud that surrounds a god or goddess while on earth. The definition surprised me a bit – not because of it’s actual meaning but because Whitman, up until this point in Leaves of Grass, in my opinion, seems to be full of himself. Here, on the other hand, Whitman seems to be placing women on such a high pedestal – namely, one that could be as high as where he places himself.

The next section that I noticed, regarding the “dirtiness” of what the human body is capable, was on page 121. Whitman says,

“Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous….quivering jelly of love….white-blow and delirious juice,

Bridegroom-night of love working surely and sofly into the prostrate dawn,

Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleace of the clasping and sweetfleshed day” (121).

To be honest, I could have never imagined the act of ejaculation to be described in a better way…at least that’s what I believe this passage to be about anyway. I take it to mean that on the wedding night, the newly married couple will make love until the early morning, while the husband releases his “limitless” man-seed, which goes hand-in-hand with the parts of the play that Whitman references fathers having five sons or on page 124 when Whitman asks the reader which of the sons of mothers who bore them will mate with the daughters of another mother. The ideas are all interconnected that life cannot exist without either the man or the woman.

Whitman makes more than one example of the idea that women are the bearers of men and because of this fact are so special and sacred. An example of this is when he states, “You are the gates of the body and you are the gates of the soul…She is all things duly veiled….she is both passive and active….she is to conveive daughters as well as sons and sons as well as daughter” (124). I think it’s quite interesting in this particular instance that the words passive and active can be duly defined – as the original meanings of the word, but further that “passive” being the physical passing of the baby through the cervix into the world and “active” in pushing the baby out and then subsequently taking action to rear the baby into an adult. Additionally, on page 124 Whitman makes a claim that within males and females lives a “natal love…in them the divine mystery” which furthers all of the references he makes earlier in the text to both the male and female bodies as being sacred. By stating this “natal love” is a “divine mystery,” it seems to me that he believes that through some powerful force, whether God or man-created, there is a physical representation (or even manifestation – get it?  – the “man” part meaning man-kind that lives within the mother for nine months) of the love shared and acted between the mother and father.