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.