Whitman is a pansexualist. He makes love with, among others, the sun, the night, the earth, the sea, and the winds (W 30, 49, 53). His synecdochic perception results in his genitalized identification with his environment, including the people around him. The spermatic trope works well to explain the nature of Whitman's decentered phallus. If sex contains all, sperm describes all (W 101). It also works well to describe the nature of his pansexualist eros.

BEAT on, proud billows; Boreas blow; / Swell, curled waves, high as Jove's roof; / Your incivility doth ſhow, / That innocence is tempeſt proof; / Though ſurly Nereus frown, my thoughts are calm; / Then ſtrike, Affliction, for thy wounds are balm. [Attributed to Roger L'Estrange (1616–1704).]

Nor, if we turn to the present, is the evidence much stronger which is offered by the gens de couleur whom you may see in the quadroon quarter this afternoon, with Ichabod legible on their murky foreheads through a vain smearing of toilet powder, dragging their chairs down to the narrow gateway of their close-fenced gardens, and staring shrinkingly at you as you pass, like a nest of yellow kittens.

Cordgrass will be planted, not left to self-colonize.