Whitman’s Twenty-Ninth Swimmer

Whitman’s poem is so full of tangents and lists and descriptions that any form of straight narrative lasting for more than a line or two seems out of place. Whitman creates twenty-eight “young men [bathing] by the shore,” who catch the eye of a twenty-eight year old woman, all her life “so lonesome” (36). The woman “hides,” in her “fine house,” and though she stays “stock still in [her] room,” Whitman’s spying woman puts herself on the beach “[d]ancing and laughing” (36). Her “unseen hand” descends “tremblingly from [the men’s] temples and ribs” but they do not know she is there they do not “think who they souse with spray” (36). This passage comes after a few descriptions of the common folk; clamdiggers; a trapper and his squaw; a runaway slave who Whitman nurses to health on his road to freedom. What is striking about the woman is that she is not common. She owns a nice house, dresses “richly” (36), and, ultimately, does not really engage with anyone. However, this is not the case to Whitman, he holds her higher than many of his creations in this poem, it seems. Speaking to her apparent inaction, we can look back to the prologue in which Whitman claims that “to be is just as great as to perceive or tell” (17). When he writes that she is splashing “in the water there” (36), we can couple it with the notion that perceiving it is tantamount to doing it. She is there in the water with these men. Speaking to her place of importance to Whitman, he addresses her in the second person, saying, “I see you” (36). This stands out because the other “you’s” in this poem are his soul and the reader. Here are some moments he addresses you, the reader,: “Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?” “Do you take it I would astonish?” “I might not tell everybody but I will tell you” (45). More significantly, here are some moments that Whitman addresses his soul: “You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,” “loose the stop from your throat,” “Not words, not music or rhyme…. not custom / or lecture, not even the best, / Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice” (30) “Smile, for your lover comes!” (47). The most interesting parallel between the woman and her bathers and Whitman and the soul, is the lust that the present. The “descending tremblingly from the temples and ribs” feels so similar to Whitman basking in a summer morning with his soul, how the soul parted “the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged [its] / tongue to my barestrip heart” (30). Curiously, we see him obfuscate his sexuality when he says that “all the men ever born are also my brothers… / and the women my sisters and lovers” (31), and here we have him glorifying, objectifying, even, the male form but from the guise of a woman. When she spies them “glistened with wet” with “little streams all over their bodies” (36) it is Whitman spying them. He says that every “kind for itself and its own” that his own consists of “male and female” (33), is does not seems such a stretch to think he would be lustful through the lens of a woman. She feels very much like Whitman, how she “saw them and loved them” (36), seems an echo of the love Whitman pronounces on almost every page. He says that “forbidden voices” will be able to speak through him (50), he says that “Copulation is no more rank to me than death is” (51), but one gets the sense that Whitman is hiding something with this woman. It is so straightforward that is certainly cannot be. This passage could very well just be a reflection of Whitman’s belief in the omnipresence of the individual, how the self is within all and it is not limited by space or death or time – the woman is able to bathe, to act on lust without leaving her room. However, I do think that there is a bit of Whitman hiding within this woman, she is receiving a wish fulfillment and, through her, he is, too.