I Sit and Look Out

As the speaker lists the sorrows he sees around him, the first focus for his sorrow is the suffering young men “at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done” (Line 2). Although the poem was published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, the eve before the Civil War and following years of violence among pro- and anti-slavery settlers streaming to the western lands hoping to extend slavery into the territories, the focus is not on young men caught up in the violence or fighting a battle. Instead, the image is far from any public conflict. The “secret convulsive sobs” suggest men who are suffering alone, “remorseful after deeds done” (Line 2). While the “secret” in Line 2 stays a secret and the reader never learns what the men are suffering from, one can infer that the “secret convulsive sobs” may be from gay men experiencing desire, especially since the 1860 edition contains the “Calamus poems,” a series that was added to the 1860 edition and was controversial for its exploration of love between men:

What scandalized readers in Whitman’s time was his frankness about heterosexual bodies, and his portrayal of women as sexual beings. Only those alert to same sex desire seemed capable of reading a deeper level of scandal in the poems, a ‘secret’—shared in broad daylight but lately unreadable—that was for them more nourishing than any other text of their time (Mark Doty, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in my Life. W.W. Norton Company, 2021).

The “secret” of gay male desire is not as explicit in this poem as it is in the Calamus poems, but the personal shame the young men feel, for whatever “deed” they have done, suggests the idea that much of the suffering in the world begins at the personal level. The young men face an internal conflict; they are “at anguish with themselves” (Line 2). By starting with this intensely private experience—the suffering within one’s own mind—Whitman shows how devastating personal suffering can be when the war is with one’s self. At the same time, their suffering suggests a war between inner versus outer forces. Society doesn’t agree with these desires (as the criticism underscores), so the young men are also at war with society, a war that mirrors brother versus brother fighting one another in the larger, national war between states.

“I”

“I” is repeated 13 times in this poem. Despite the significant presence of the “I,” the “I” stays at a distance from those that the “I” contemplates. This speaker does not transform into the Other as it does in Whitman’s “The Sleepers”:

I am the actor and the actress, the voter, the politician,

The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box,

He who has been famous, and he who shall be famous after today

The stammerer, the well-form’d person, the wasted or feeble person (Whitman, Walt. “The Sleepers.” Academy of American Poets).

Unlike the speaker in the lines above, the speaker in “I Sit and Look Out” does not assume to know the Other’s experience. This lack of knowledge and power creates a static heaviness to the “I,” who is trapped in his perspective, able to do nothing but look out at the suffering he sees but unable to effect change. This is a much diminished “I,” compared to many of the speakers in the earlier editions of Leaves of Grass. The first 1855 edition even included an image of the author dressed in working man’s clothes, showing Whitman’s desire to transform himself and become unified with the working class. But in this 1860 poem, the speaker is unable to achieve such transformation. He can see but cannot embrace the people he loves.