Are you the new person drawn toward me?

Walt Whitman’s fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People only see what they are prepared to see.” People have a tendency to try and make the outside word fit the ideals they have formed in their own minds. They want to make the outward narrative, what is “real,” conform to their “ideal.” The speaker acknowledges this tendency of the stranger to see only what they want to see and warns, “I am surely far different from what you suppose” (Line 2). The supposition of the addressee is that the speaker fits their “ideal” (Line 3). What the addressee wants to see in the speaker is “friendship” and love replete with “unalloy’d satisfaction” (Line 5). Where the stranger hopes to see someone who is “trusty and faithful” (Line 6) with a “smooth and tolerant manner” (Line 7), the speaker implies that they are quite the opposite. The image of a “real heroic man” the stranger wants to find in the speaker is unfounded. It is “all maya, illusion” (Line 9). What the “dreamer” hopes to see and find was never really there in the first place. The stranger was merely projecting their idealizations onto the person standing before them.