The Opium Eater Reclines...

"The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,)"

And so it is that Whitman at once acknowledges, takes part in, is one with, and sympathizes with what might be considered the lower rungs of society. I think the word sympathy is important:

"I am he attesting sympathy;
Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?
I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality;
Am not the poet of goodness only. . . . I do not decline to be the poet of wick-edness also."

for as Websters dictionary tells us, sympathy, amongst other things, is the "correlation existing between bodies capable of communicating their vibrational motion to one another through some medium." Whitman's exploration, I think, is an attempt at unearthing these mediums in order to communicate with all that surrounds him, and thereby with himself.

What does he unearth in his embrace of communication by sympathy?

Whitman gives the opium eater only a glance, but in that glance he takes in the entire intricate and interconnected network of his community and country. Take the New York opium dens, for instance, that are implied in this glance. What was happening there? Who was present? As it turns out the opium den was a sort of melting pot, where people of all races would "indiscriminately mix." The drug itself, much like the prostitute, compelled people from all strata of society from the destitute wanderer to the aristocrat or politician. Perhaps that partially explains Whitman's juxtaposition of the prostitute and the president: (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) / The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries."

But opium itself also suggests some other interesting cultural complexities. The drug was largely distributed by an new influx of Chinese immigrant workers. Though Chinese immigrants were not employed until 1865 to work on the Transcontinental Railroad, the influx of Chinese immigrants began early in the 19th century. The opium trade was inextricably bound to this immigration and so bound to culture of its bearers.

Opium also had its ties with writers of the time, though primarily English, and so the nod to the opium eater brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his poem Kubla Khan, or Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

More applicable to Leaves of Grass though is the rich and diverse, if at times dangerous and seedy, culture that opium in the 19th century came to represent. In later years wars would be fought over the drug and countless acts of destitution would result from its abuse. Nonetheless, in New York, in 1855, opium culture came to embody a sort of uncouth but undeniable leisure that a poet of wickedness and goodness might find sympathy for.