The soft-touched liquid light
Drips down skeleton branches, stained red and gold by autumn leaves,
While you, unable to resist the siren song of trees and grass, abandon the worn trail tamed and molded by human hand
To pause beneath a tree— ancient, somber, wild.
Dirt clings to your knees as you kneel before this temple made of wood and search among its roots,
To uncover a walnut, the black outside peeling away from wrinkled skin.
The dying layer, meant to protect, turns your fingers dark.
They used to turn this into ink, you know, you say, reverently holding your palm in the dancing sunbeam. What a human thing to do.
The walnut leaves its mark on both of us, you
Staining fingerprints across my ribcage,
Biting wine-dark kisses down my neck.
I’ve always been a skeptic but you,
You find god in the smallest things. And this smile, soft and secretive and burning into my soul like the sun itself,
Is enough to cause a conversion.

Whitman’s “To a Stranger” reflects on the idealization of love, addressing the “you” of the poem as the “he I was seeking, or she I was seeking” (line 2). The “stranger” is left ambiguous in all characteristics, including gender, as they are referenced as both a “boy” and a “girl” (line 5). The body of the “stranger” is left without any defining characteristics, as they give of their ” eyes, face, [and] flesh,” while Whitman himself gives of his “beard,” assigning himself a concrete idea of gender that clashes against the stranger’s genderlessness nature. This uncertainty is reflected in Whitman’s characterization of the pair as “fluid,” suggesting a queerness in both sexuality and gender (line 4). While unusual for the Romantic period, Whitman has “often [been] credited with inventing the language of homosexual love” with speculations of his attraction towards men (Cambridge History 330).

The ambiguity of the mysterious stranger allows for an idealization of them as a romantic partner; if Whitman and the reader know nothing of them, it leaves space for the building of unrealistic expectations. This is in line with the tradition of “ideal love” that Selinger argues for. Ideal love is the romanticized love of poetic tradition, “a mystical merger, an absolute satisfaction in which contingency and difference melt away… whether that love is with another person or with the divine” (Selinger 4). Whitman describes this “merger” as the stranger’s “body has become not [theirs] only nor left [his] body [his] only,” displaying a reverence for the forming relationship (line 6). Despite the Romantic divergence from the religious tones of the Early National period, this is reminiscent of the imagery employed by Bradstreet.

Emerson also pulls from religious imagery, subverting the god-oriented poetry of the Early National period. Rather than crediting love to the Christian god, he creates love as a religious authority, mimicking Biblical commandments in his exhortation to “give all to love; / Obey thy heart… Follow it utterly” (lines 1-2, 9). He turns the Puritan system on its head, offering an arguably stricter doctrine of love which demands “friends, kindred, days, / Estate, good-fame, / Plans, credit and the Muse” from the individual seeking romance (lines 3-5). This conception of love fully embraces the obsessive, all-consuming nature of love, elevating it as a transcendental experience. Those in love, he asserts, will have “souls above doubt, / Valor unbending” and will eventually “return / More than they were, / And ever ascending” (lines 19-20, 21-23). In contrast to Bradstreet’s conception of god’s everlasting love, Emerson argues that it is love, not religious devotion, which elevates man.

To a Stranger– Walt Whitman
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Give All to Love– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse,—
Nothing refuse.
’T is a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope:
High and more high
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent:
But it is a god,
Knows its own path
And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean;
It requireth courage stout.
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending,
It will reward,—
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,—
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.

Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.