I really enjoyed Walt Whitman’s poem “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers” because of the sort of double entendre it proposes. From the start, the imagery of “aching rivers,/ From that of myself” (2) juxtaposes the similarities between the water that flows in nature and the blood that courses in human veins. In all of Whitman’s work, he seems very interested in the human condition and experience. This is evident in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” where Whitman reflects joyfully on the ways in which all generations of humans are connected.
It seems to me that he thought often and deeply about the interconnectedness of humanity, especially through reproduction. Whitman is aware of the need to reproduce: after all, he is “singing the song of procreation/ singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people” (7). Whitman was condemned for his open discussion of the pleasures of sex, so I believe he hoped that, going forward, parents would raise their children not to believe that sex is taboo or unnatural. I wonder what Whitman would have thought about the dull romance of The Last of the Mohicans, which was written only about 35 years before Children of Adam. While there certainly is a lot of love and romance in Cooper’s novel, the author alludes to all the passion. Perhaps the novel would’ve benefited from Whitman’s elegant description.
The river in and of itself is a great image to convey sex. Rivers can be fertile and rich, feeding animals and allowing things to grow. They can move quickly or slowly. They are passageways to new destinations and opportunities. Readers would not shame this description of nature without knowing its erotic undertones.
Since we talked a lot in class about how Whitman might have been gay, I was interested in how gendered his description of love and sex is in the poem. He writes, “the female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching/ the divine list for myself or you or for any one making” (24). While of course Whitman might not be the speaker in this poem, it struck me as the first Whitman poem I had read that is not open for interpretation on the basis of sexuality. I think his description is beautiful: “the oath of the inseparableness of two together, of the woman that loves/ me and whom I love more than my life, that oath swearing, (O I willingly stake all for you” (33). His language is intense and emotional.
Hadley, I agree with your thoughts. I thought “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers” was also really beautiful and a call for making the simple pleasures and naturalness of sex more accepted. I also noted how this poem in particular did not seem like a poem about gay sex or love, but more focused on sex in general, in this case, between a man and a woman. I think his analogies and symbolism of sex in nature helps promote the ideology that it is a natural human function and should not be shunned or stigmatized.