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And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall!
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!
I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself am capable of loving.
Given the meanings Whitman has folded into the calamus plant throughout the rest of the section, it becomes impossible to see it here as phallic only: this poem restates the caution that only a few are capable of receiving and comprehending the burden of his poems -- the calamus and its implications. These few are "youths," "young men," those who find it easier to go down the "paths untrodden," where the calamus grows. The various separate themes which critics such as Miller have found in the "Calamus" section seem to me, where they are in fact present, to be made one by these first five poems when the poems are read as parts of a coherent structure. The celebration of adhesiveness, for instance, celebrates the poems themselves, their origin and their nature. The poet's statement, in "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," that he could not "utter joyous leaves of dark green" without a "friend or lover near" means not only that Walt Whitman could not be joyous without a lover but that the reason the Bard utters the leaves of "Calamus" -- indeed the whole of Leaves of Grass -- is to express and create that love, that relationship between poet and reader, to "celebrate the need of comrades" and to
. . . plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
[to] make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
A poem like "We Two Boys Together Clinging," which seems no more than a celebration of companionship, with no mention of poetry⁶, becomes, simply by being placed in the "Calamus" section, a celebration of the impulse at the base of the poems. The poems which include "warnings" are cautions about misreading the poems, reminders that the poet demands complete devotion from those who "seek to become eleve of mine," or the "candidate for my affections." His addresses to the future reader, to "recorders ages hence," are invitations and warnings; they invite the reader to enter this relationship, to become the poet's reader-lover, and warn him that it is difficult, uncertain, dangerous to do so. They are of a piece with his assertions that his poems are identifiable with love and death; of a piece with the conclusion of "Calamus":
When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)
Those poems in the section which overtly discuss the poetry are, it seems clear, susceptible in any context of only one reading. It is these unambiguous poems (such as "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone" and "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me") which provide immovable guides by which to navigate the ambiguities of the rest of the section. These establish the theme which underlies all the other, subordinate motifs and which make the reader see that they are metaphors for aspects of the poetic process. "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone," for instance, cannot be reconciled with any reading of the section other than a literary one. Whitman announces that his poems are leaves, flowers offered to those who will be properly receptive, who can dwell "in paths untrodden"; leaves and flowers to be unfolded as Whitman unfolds them in "Scented Herbage"; leaves and flowers which bring their perfume to those who can accept it; leaves and flowers which will grow in his readers:
Frost-mellow'd berries and Third-month twigs offer'd fresh to young persons wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,