We seem to be slipping between metaphor and metonymy here: the heart is not so much a metaphor for the penis as it is part of a metonymic system, a circuit of excited blood pumped from the heart to the stiffening sexual organ and, through capillaries webbed throughout the body, to the surface of the eroticized skin. The male phallic imagery here is rendered, surprisingly, in female nurturant terms, as the “udder” is squeezed until it releases its milk or semen. The “prurient provokers” are described as “straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,” and this wildly conflated image genitalizes the heart (just as in Section 5), merging the conventional seat of emotions with the sexual organs. Whitman captures the way that intense erotic experience creates sensations of torture and rapture, as if we are dying in the most heightened moment of living. We sense that the other body so completely in touch with our own “is hardly different from myself”: the moment is simultaneously mystical and physical, as touch allows us a glimpse of being that seems out-of-body precisely because it has so fully heightened the sensitivity of every inch of our flesh to a body not our own. We can never be quite sure who the “prurient provokers” are who “stiffen my limbs” and “graze at the edges of me,” like mouths devouring the very edges of identity. When touch is fully activated, the “fellow-senses” slide away, and we give ourselves over to the charged interpenetration of body with body. The vagueness creates a charged sexual field in which any act of intense touch can be imagined. This passage has been read as a description of homosexual passion, masturbation, and/or heterosexual intercourse. Every moment of touch, Whitman suggests, “quivers us to a new identity,” as our sense receptors respond to the provocative stimuli of the world that are constantly redefining who we are as we feel the flames of sensual contact rush through our veins. The twentieth-century poet Karl Shapiro called this section “one of the greatest moments of poetry,” as Whitman takes us through a shimmering cascade of sensual images that are at once sexually explicit and maddeningly vague. Now Whitman explores what it feels like to touch, to really touch.