I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
 twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
The tree branch evokes a particular sentiment that Whitman doesn’t try to explain thoroughly, except that it may remind of him the detached yet firm love that he sees as manly. And there are evident homosexual connotations to  manly love , including the twig as a phallic symbol. 
 Whitman’s “manly love” may also allude to Man’s exclusive mode of loving: the love of consciously loving an  other . To borrow loosely from Oscar Wilde, who shared a similar sexual orientation with our poet, to love manly “ is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection ,” producing feelings richer than the “joy uttered” by that imagined upon the solitary oak tree. 
 Whitman’s curious token then, perhaps even the entire poem, may mean to him a celebration of the consciousness of love as we can experience it: a love shared, a love richer, a love manly—a love our poet perchance knew very well that the oak tree could not, yet, by placing a small part of it in sight in his room, offered his love to it.
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing