15 pages • 30 minutes read
Walt WhitmanHours Continuing Long
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1860A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Affection and Friendship Between Men
The friend who occupies Whitman’s thoughts and disturbs his emotions is a man. These two men have—or did have—a close relationship. They were emotionally involved with each other, although the poem only has insight into one man’s perspective on the relationship, that of the poet. How the other man felt or feels is unknown because the two have separated. For his part, Whitman feels a deep connection with his friend and cannot bear to be apart from him, as Line 4 makes clear: He longs for “the one I cannot content myself without,” and he cannot forget him. This emotional attachment appears to describe a romantic relationship, however, the poem contains no reference to sexuality. The use of the phrase “his friend, his lover” (Line 8) does not imply sex. The word “lover” was often used by American men in the mid-19th century simply to describe a close male friend (as David S. Reynolds notes in his book, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, 1995, p. 392). However, it cannot be known for certain whether Whitman is describing one of his real relationships in the poem, or whether the relationship presented is a product of his imagination and fantasy.
The Pain of Separation
A list of some of the adjectives Whitman employs to describe his state of mind conveys the depth of his misery: “heavy-hearted” (Line 1), “discouraged, distracted” (Line 4), “[s]ullen and suffering” (Line 6), “torment” (Line 7), “dejected” (Line 9), “anguish” (Line 10), and “deprest” (Line 11). Not only is the poet in deep emotional pain, he seems resigned to suffering in silence and cannot see his way out of it.
The poet is in pain because he is separated from his friend. He no longer sees him or hears from him. He cannot discuss things with him. He cannot talk things over and try to rekindle lost love or at least reach a tolerable rapprochement. This poem, his outpouring of misery, is all there is. In the mental and emotional place where his relationship once was, there is now a constant torture. Whitman’s incessant dialogue is only with himself; there is only one person in this poem about a former love. The grief he endures is akin to a bereavement; something precious has died, gone out of existence, and there is no help for it. One might assume that the pain of the separation is as great as the joy of the togetherness was, when it was.
Because the poet is so obsessed with present torment, it is as if those past joys never existed. He says nothing about them. He does not describe himself and his friend together, recalling what they did or said to each other; there are no fond memories, lovingly recorded. In happier poems in the “Calamus” cluster in Leaves of Grass, he does just that. “When I Heard at the Close of Day” recalls how he and a male friend lay blissfully together on the beach at night; in “Recorders Ages Hence,” he describes how he and his friend wandered happily hand-in-hand through woods, fields, and streets. In contrast, everything in “Hours Continuing Long” is solitary; it is just Whitman, alone with his thoughts and feelings. Where once there were two together, there is now only one, and therein lies the pain.
Shame
In Line 6, Whitman is troubled both by the loss of his relationship with his friend and his reaction to it: “I am ashamed,” he writes. Shame often involves feelings of guilt, as if one has done something wrong or inappropriate. Whitman might mean that he is ashamed of himself for getting so attached to somebody in a way that compromises the independence of his nature. He might be ashamed for getting so upset when the relationship ended; perhaps he thinks that is a sign of weakness. Whatever his exact meaning, he immediately repudiates it: “but it is useless—I am what I am” (Line 6).
It seems that he is trying to convince himself that it is pointless to be ashamed of his relationship or his emotional reaction to its end. This is, he says, because he is feeling and acting according to his own nature, and no blame or shame can be attached to that. However, his haste to repudiate shame, to affirm there is nothing wrong in feeling what he feels, seems on the contrary to show how much it is affecting him. Shame can produce feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism, inner voices that are difficult to silence. In Lines 7 and 8, Whitman wonders whether anyone else has ever felt the way he does. Lying behind this is the anxiety that he might in some way be different from others, which is a common sign of an emotional imbalance—a feeling that somehow one is atypical. The battery of questions that follow, in the remainder of the poem, is designed to nourish the hope that the friend from whom he is estranged is feeling the same as he does. If true—and Whitman desperately wants it to be so—this would likely ease his feelings of remorse, isolation, and shame.
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By Walt Whitman
