"Said W: 'Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that could be answered?' 'I don't see why you call that letter driving you hard. It's quiet enough--it only asks questions, and asks the questions mildly enough,' 'I suppose you are right--"drive" is not exactly the word: yet you know how I hate to be catechised. Symonds is right, no doubt, to ask the questions: I am just as much right if I do not answer them: just as much right if I do answer them. I often say to myself about Calamus--perhaps it means more or less than what I thought myself--means different: perhaps I don't know what it all means--perhaps never did know. My first instinct about all that Symonds writes is violently reactionary--is strong and brutal for no, no, no. Then the thought intervenes that I maybe do not know all my own meanings: I say to myself: "You, too, go away, come back, study your own book--as alien or stranger, study your own book, see what it amounts to." Some time or other I will have to write to him definitely about Calamus--give him my word for it what I meant or mean it to mean.'" Again, a month later (May 24, 1888), Whitman speaks to Traubel of a "beautiful letter" from Symonds. "You will see that he harps on the Calamus poems again. I don't see why it should, but his recurrence to that subject irritates me a little. I suppose you might say--why don't you shut him up by answering him? There is no logical answer to that I suppose: but I may ask in my turn: 'What right has he to ask questions anyway?'" W. laughed a bit. "Anyway the question comes back to me almost every time he writes. He is courteous enough about it--that is the reason I do not resent him. I suppose the whole thing will end in an answer some day." The letter follows. The chief point in it is that the writer hopes he has not been importunate in the question he had asked about Calamus three years before.