A strange and sensual riff from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself —
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth
bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their
long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending
arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
Biblioklept 
This bathing scene always reminds me of the similar one in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ fragmentary “Epithalamion.”
“We are there when we hear the shout
…And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.
By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.”
The new bather strips to swim in a sequence enfolding natural descriptions with ecdysiacal excitement.
“Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with—down he dings
His bleachèd both and woolwoven wear:
Careless these in coloured wisp
All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last he offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet”
Unlike Whitman, ever-in-the-closet Hopkins tries to shoehorn just before the fragment’s end a snatch of heterosexual allegory into his reverie.
“Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean
I should be wronging longer leaving it to float
Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note—
What is … the delightful dene?
Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.”
Of course it is.
The Poem: http://www.bartleby.com/122/72.html
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[…] you recall these bits? The trapper’s wedding? The runaway slave? The twenty-eight bathers and the woman who spies on them? I read them aloud to the room, ostensibly to the people in the room, but maybe just to myself. […]
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