{"id":45,"date":"2021-06-10T15:28:39","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T19:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/poetryandpoetics2024\/chapter\/walt-whitman\/"},"modified":"2024-08-08T15:53:49","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T19:53:49","slug":"walt-whitman","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/poetryandpoetics2024\/chapter\/walt-whitman\/","title":{"raw":"Walt Whitman","rendered":"Walt Whitman"},"content":{"raw":"

Song of Myself<\/h1>\n1<\/strong>\nI celebrate myself, and sing myself,\nAnd what I assume you shall assume,\nFor every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.\n\nI loafe and invite my soul,\nI lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.\n\nMy tongue, every atom of my blood, form\u2019d from this soil, this air,\nBorn here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,\nI, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,\nHoping to cease not till death.\n\nCreeds and schools in abeyance,\nRetiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,\nI harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,\nNature without check with original energy.\n\n2<\/strong>\nHouses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,\nI breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,\nThe distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.\n\nThe atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,\nIt is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,\nI will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,\nI am mad for it to be in contact with me.\n\nThe smoke of my own breath,\nEchoes, ripples, buzz\u2019d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,\nMy respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,\nThe sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color\u2019d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,\nThe sound of the belch\u2019d words of my voice loos\u2019d to the eddies of the wind,\nA few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,\nThe play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,\nThe delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,\nThe feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.\n\nHave you reckon\u2019d a thousand acres much? have you reckon\u2019d the earth much?\nHave you practis\u2019d so long to learn to read?\nHave you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?\n\nStop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,\nYou shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)\nYou shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,\nYou shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,\nYou shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.\n\n3<\/strong>\nI have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,\nBut I do not talk of the beginning or the end.\n\nThere was never any more inception than there is now,\nNor any more youth or age than there is now,\nAnd will never be any more perfection than there is now,\nNor any more heaven or hell than there is now.\n\nUrge and urge and urge,\nAlways the procreant urge of the world.\n\nOut of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,\nAlways a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.\n\nTo elaborate is no avail, learn\u2019d and unlearn\u2019d feel that it is so.\n\nSure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,\nStout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,\nI and this mystery here we stand.\n\nClear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.\n\nLack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,\nTill that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.\n\nShowing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,\nKnowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.\n\nWelcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,\nNot an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.\n\nI am satisfied\u2014I see, dance, laugh, sing;\nAs the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,\nLeaving me baskets cover\u2019d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,\nShall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,\nThat they turn from gazing after and down the road,\nAnd forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,\nExactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?\n\n4<\/strong>\nTrippers and askers surround me,\nPeople I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,\nThe latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,\nMy dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,\nThe real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,\nThe sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,\nBattles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;\nThese come to me days and nights and go from me again,\nBut they are not the Me myself.\n\nApart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,\nStands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,\nLooks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,\nLooking with side-curved head curious what will come next,\nBoth in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.\n\nBackward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,\nI have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.\n\n5<\/strong>\nI believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,\nAnd you must not be abased to the other.\n\nLoafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,\nNot words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,\nOnly the lull I like, the hum of your valv\u00e8d voice.\n\nI mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,\nHow you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn\u2019d over upon me,\nAnd parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,\nAnd reach\u2019d till you felt my beard, and reach\u2019d till you held my feet.\n\nSwiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,\nAnd I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,\nAnd I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,\nAnd that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,\nAnd that a kelson of the creation is love,\nAnd limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,\nAnd brown ants in the little wells beneath them,\nAnd mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap\u2019d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.\n\n6<\/strong>\nA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;\nHow could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.\n\nI guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.\n\nOr I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,\nA scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,\nBearing the owner\u2019s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?\n\nOr I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.\n\nOr I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,\nAnd it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,\nGrowing among black folks as among white,\nKanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.\n\nAnd now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.\n\nTenderly will I use you curling grass,\nIt may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,\nIt may be if I had known them I would have loved them,\nIt may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers\u2019 laps,\nAnd here you are the mothers\u2019 laps.\n\nThis grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,\nDarker than the colorless beards of old men,\nDark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.\n\nO I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,\nAnd I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.\n\nI wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,\nAnd the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.\n\nWhat do you think has become of the young and old men?\nAnd what do you think has become of the women and children?\n\nThey are alive and well somewhere,\nThe smallest sprout shows there is really no death,\nAnd if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,\nAnd ceas\u2019d the moment life appear\u2019d.\n\nAll goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,\nAnd to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.\n\n7<\/strong>\nHas any one supposed it lucky to be born?\nI hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.\n\nI pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash\u2019d babe, and am not contain\u2019d between my hat and boots,\nAnd peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,\nThe earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.\n\nI am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,\nI am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,\n(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)\n\nEvery kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,\nFor me those that have been boys and that love women,\nFor me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,\nFor me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,\nFor me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,\nFor me children and the begetters of children.\n\nUndrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,\nI see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,\nAnd am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.\n\n8<\/strong>\nThe little one sleeps in its cradle,\nI lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.\n\nThe youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,\nI peeringly view them from the top.\n\nThe suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,\nI witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.\n\nThe blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,\nThe heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,\nThe snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,\nThe hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous\u2019d mobs,\nThe flap of the curtain\u2019d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,\nThe meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,\nThe excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,\nThe impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,\nWhat groans of over-fed or half-starv\u2019d who fall sunstruck or in fits,\nWhat exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,\nWhat living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain\u2019d by decorum,\nArrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,\nI mind them or the show or resonance of them\u2014I come and I depart.\n\n9<\/strong>\nThe big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,\nThe dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,\nThe clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,\nThe armfuls are pack\u2019d to the sagging mow.\n\nI am there, I help, I came stretch\u2019d atop of the load,\nI felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,\nI jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,\nAnd roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.\n\n10<\/strong>\nAlone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,\nWandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,\nIn the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,\nKindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill\u2019d game,\nFalling asleep on the gather\u2019d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.\n\nThe Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,\n\nMy eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.\n\nThe boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,\nI tuck\u2019d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;\nYou should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.\n\nI saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,\nHer father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders,\nOn a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,\nShe had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach\u2019d to her feet.\n\nThe runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,\nI heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,\nThrough the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,\nAnd went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,\nAnd brought water and fill\u2019d a tub for his sweated body and bruis\u2019d feet,\nAnd gave him a room that enter\u2019d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,\nAnd remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,\nAnd remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;\nHe staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass\u2019d north,\nI had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean\u2019d in the corner.\n\n11<\/strong>\nTwenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,\nTwenty-eight young men and all so friendly;\nTwenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.\n\nShe owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,\nShe hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.\n\nWhich of the young men does she like the best?\nAh the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.\n\nWhere are you off to, lady? for I see you,\nYou splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.\n\nDancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,\nThe rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.\n\nThe beards of the young men glisten\u2019d with wet, it ran from their long hair,\nLittle streams pass\u2019d all over their bodies.\n\nAn unseen hand also pass\u2019d over their bodies,\nIt descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.\n\nThe young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,\nThey do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,\nThey do not think whom they souse with spray.\n\n12<\/strong>\nThe butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,\nI loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.\n\nBlacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,\nEach has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.\n\nFrom the cinder-strew\u2019d threshold I follow their movements,\nThe lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,\nOverhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,\nThey do not hasten, each man hits in his place.\n\n13<\/strong>\nThe negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,\nThe negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois\u2019d on one leg on the string-piece,\nHis blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band,\nHis glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,\nThe sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish\u2019d and perfect limbs.\n\nI behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,\nI go with the team also.\n\nIn me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,\nTo niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,\nAbsorbing all to myself and for this song.\n\nOxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?\nIt seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.\n\nMy tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,\nThey rise together, they slowly circle around.\n\nI believe in those wing\u2019d purposes,\nAnd acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,\nAnd consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,\nAnd do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,\nAnd the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,\nAnd the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.\n\n14<\/strong>\nThe wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,\nYa-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,\nThe pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,\nFind its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.\n\nThe sharp-hoof\u2019d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,\nThe litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,\nThe brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,\nI see in them and myself the same old law.\n\nThe press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,\nThey scorn the best I can do to relate them.\n\nI am enamour\u2019d of growing out-doors,\nOf men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,\nOf the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,\nI can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.\n\nWhat is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,\nMe going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,\nAdorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,\nNot asking the sky to come down to my good will,\nScattering it freely forever.\n\n15<\/strong>\nThe pure contralto sings in the organ loft,\nThe carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,\nThe married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,\nThe pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,\nThe mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,\n\nThe duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,\nThe deacons are ordain\u2019d with cross\u2019d hands at the altar,\nThe spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,\nThe farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,\nThe lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm\u2019d case,\n(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother\u2019s bed-room;)\nThe jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,\nHe turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;\nThe malform\u2019d limbs are tied to the surgeon\u2019s table,\nWhat is removed drops horribly in a pail;\nThe quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,\nThe machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,\nThe young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)\nThe half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,\nThe western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,\nOut from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;\nThe groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,\nAs the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,\nThe bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,\nThe youth lies awake in the cedar-roof\u2019d garret and harks to the musical rain,\nThe Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,\nThe squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm\u2019d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,\nThe connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,\nAs the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,\nThe young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,\nThe one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,\nThe clean-hair\u2019d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,\nThe paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter\u2019s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold,\nThe canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,\nThe conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,\nThe child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,\nThe regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)\nThe drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,\nThe pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)\nThe bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,\nThe opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open\u2019d lips,\nThe prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,\nThe crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,\n(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)\nThe President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,\nOn the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,\nThe crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,\nThe Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,\nAs the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change,\nThe floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,\nIn single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;\nSeasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather\u2019d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)\nSeasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground;\nOff on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,\nThe stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,\nFlatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,\nCoon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain\u2019d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,\nTorches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,\n\nPatriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,\nIn walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day\u2019s sport,\nThe city sleeps and the country sleeps,\nThe living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,\nThe old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;\nAnd these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,\nAnd such as it is to be of these more or less I am,\nAnd of these one and all I weave the song of myself.\n\n16<\/strong>\nI am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,\nRegardless of others, ever regardful of others,\nMaternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,\nStuff\u2019d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff\u2019d with the stuff that is fine,\nOne of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,\nA Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,\nA Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,\nA Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,\nA boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;\nAt home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,\nAt home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,\nAt home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,\nComrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)\nComrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,\nA learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,\nA novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,\nOf every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,\nA farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,\nPrisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.\n\nI resist any thing better than my own diversity,\nBreathe the air but leave plenty after me,\nAnd am not stuck up, and am in my place.\n\n(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,\nThe bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,\nThe palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)\n\n17<\/strong>\nThese are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,\nIf they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,\nIf they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,\nIf they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.\n\nThis is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,\nThis the common air that bathes the globe.\n\n18<\/strong>\nWith music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,\nI play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer\u2019d and slain persons.\n\nHave you heard that it was good to gain the day?\nI also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.\n\nI beat and pound for the dead,\nI blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.\n\nVivas to those who have fail\u2019d!\nAnd to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!\nAnd to those themselves who sank in the sea!\nAnd to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!\nAnd the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!\n\n19<\/strong>\nThis is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,\nIt is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,\nI will not have a single person slighted or left away,\nThe kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,\nThe heavy-lipp\u2019d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;\nThere shall be no difference between them and the rest.\n\nThis is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,\nThis the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,\nThis the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,\nThis the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.\n\nDo you guess I have some intricate purpose?\nWell I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.\n\nDo you take it I would astonish?\nDoes the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?\nDo I astonish more than they?\n\nThis hour I tell things in confidence,\nI might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.\n\n20<\/strong>\nWho goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;\nHow is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?\n\nWhat is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?\n\nAll I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,\nElse it were time lost listening to me.\n\nI do not snivel that snivel the world over,\nThat months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.\n\nWhimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov\u2019d,\nI wear my hat as I please indoors or out.\n\nWhy should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?\n\nHaving pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel\u2019d with doctors and calculated close,\nI find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.\n\nIn all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,\nAnd the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.\n\nI know I am solid and sound,\nTo me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,\nAll are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.\n\nI know I am deathless,\nI know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter\u2019s compass,\nI know I shall not pass like a child\u2019s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.\n\nI know I am august,\nI do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,\nI see that the elementary laws never apologize,\n(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)\n\nI exist as I am, that is enough,\nIf no other in the world be aware I sit content,\nAnd if each and all be aware I sit content.\n\nOne world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,\nAnd whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,\nI can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.\n\nMy foothold is tenon\u2019d and mortis\u2019d in granite,\nI laugh at what you call dissolution,\nAnd I know the amplitude of time.\n\n21<\/strong>\nI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,\nThe pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,\nThe first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.\n\nI am the poet of the woman the same as the man,\nAnd I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,\nAnd I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.\n\nI chant the chant of dilation or pride,\nWe have had ducking and deprecating about enough,\nI show that size is only development.\n\nHave you outstript the rest? are you the President?\nIt is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.\n\nI am he that walks with the tender and growing night,\nI call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.\n\nPress close bare-bosom\u2019d night\u2014press close magnetic nourishing night!\nNight of south winds\u2014night of the large few stars!\nStill nodding night\u2014mad naked summer night.\n\nSmile O voluptuous cool-breath\u2019d earth!\nEarth of the slumbering and liquid trees!\nEarth of departed sunset\u2014earth of the mountains misty-topt!\nEarth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!\nEarth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!\nEarth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!\nFar-swooping elbow\u2019d earth\u2014rich apple-blossom\u2019d earth!\nSmile, for your lover comes.\n\nProdigal, you have given me love\u2014therefore I to you give love!\nO unspeakable passionate love.\n\n22<\/strong>\nYou sea! I resign myself to you also\u2014I guess what you mean,\nI behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,\nI believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,\nWe must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,\nCushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,\nDash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.\n\nSea of stretch\u2019d ground-swells,\nSea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,\nSea of the brine of life and of unshovell\u2019d yet always-ready graves,\nHowler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,\nI am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.\n\nPartaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,\nExtoller of amies and those that sleep in each others\u2019 arms.\n\nI am he attesting sympathy,\n(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)\n\nI am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.\n\nWhat blurt is this about virtue and about vice?\nEvil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,\nMy gait is no fault-finder\u2019s or rejecter\u2019s gait,\nI moisten the roots of all that has grown.\n\nDid you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?\nDid you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work\u2019d over and rectified?\n\nI find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,\nSoft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,\nThoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.\n\nThis minute that comes to me over the past decillions,\nThere is no better than it and now.\n\nWhat behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,\nThe wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.\n\n23<\/strong>\nEndless unfolding of words of ages!\nAnd mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.\n\nA word of the faith that never balks,\nHere or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.\n\nIt alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,\nThat mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.\n\nI accept Reality and dare not question it,\nMaterialism first and last imbuing.\n\nHurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!\nFetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,\nThis is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,\nThese mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.\nThis is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.\n\nGentlemen, to you the first honors always!\nYour facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,\nI but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.\n\nLess the reminders of properties told my words,\nAnd more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,\nAnd make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt,\nAnd beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.\n\n24<\/strong>\nWalt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,\nTurbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,\nNo sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,\nNo more modest than immodest.\n\nUnscrew the locks from the doors!\nUnscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!\n\nWhoever degrades another degrades me,\nAnd whatever is done or said returns at last to me.\n\nThrough me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.\n\nI speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,\nBy God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.\n\nThrough me many long dumb voices,\nVoices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,\nVoices of the diseas\u2019d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,\nVoices of cycles of preparation and accretion,\nAnd of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,\nAnd of the rights of them the others are down upon,\nOf the deform\u2019d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,\nFog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.\n\nThrough me forbidden voices,\nVoices of sexes and lusts, voices veil\u2019d and I remove the veil,\nVoices indecent by me clarified and transfigur\u2019d.\n\nI do not press my fingers across my mouth,\nI keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,\nCopulation is no more rank to me than death is.\n\nI believe in the flesh and the appetites,\nSeeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.\n\nDivine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch\u2019d from,\nThe scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,\nThis head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.\n\nIf I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,\nTranslucent mould of me it shall be you!\nShaded ledges and rests it shall be you!\nFirm masculine colter it shall be you!\nWhatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!\nYou my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!\nBreast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!\nMy brain it shall be your occult convolutions!\nRoot of wash\u2019d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!\nMix\u2019d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!\nTrickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!\nSun so generous it shall be you!\nVapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!\nYou sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!\nWinds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!\nBroad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!\nHands I have taken, face I have kiss\u2019d, mortal I have ever touch\u2019d, it shall be you.\n\nI dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,\nEach moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,\nI cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,\nNor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.\n\nThat I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,\nA morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.\n\nTo behold the day-break!\nThe little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,\nThe air tastes good to my palate.\n\nHefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding,\nScooting obliquely high and low.\n\nSomething I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,\nSeas of bright juice suffuse heaven.\n\nThe earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,\nThe heav\u2019d challenge from the east that moment over my head,\nThe mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!\n\n25<\/strong>\nDazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,\nIf I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.\n\nWe also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,\nWe found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.\n\nMy voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,\nWith the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.\n\nSpeech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,\nIt provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,\nWalt you contain enough, why don\u2019t you let it out then?\n\nCome now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,\nDo you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?\nWaiting in gloom, protected by frost,\nThe dirt receding before my prophetical screams,\nI underlying causes to balance them at last,\nMy knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,\nHappiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)\n\nMy final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,\nEncompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,\nI crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.\n\nWriting and talk do not prove me,\nI carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,\nWith the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.\n\n26<\/strong>\nNow I will do nothing but listen,\nTo accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.\n\nI hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,\nI hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,\nI hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,\nSounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,\nTalkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,\nThe angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,\nThe judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,\nThe heave\u2019e\u2019yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,\nThe ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color\u2019d lights,\nThe steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,\nThe slow march play\u2019d at the head of the association marching two and two,\n(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)\n\nI hear the violoncello, (\u2019tis the young man\u2019s heart\u2019s complaint,)\nI hear the key\u2019d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,\nIt shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.\n\nI hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,\nAh this indeed is music\u2014this suits me.\n\nA tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,\nThe orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.\n\nI hear the train\u2019d soprano (what work with hers is this?)\nThe orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,\nIt wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess\u2019d them,\nIt sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick\u2019d by the indolent waves,\nI am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,\nSteep\u2019d amid honey\u2019d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,\n\nAt length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,\nAnd that we call Being.\n\n27<\/strong>\nTo be in any form, what is that?\n(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)\nIf nothing lay more develop\u2019d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.\n\nMine is no callous shell,\nI have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,\nThey seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.\n\nI merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,\nTo touch my person to some one else\u2019s is about as much as I can stand.\n\n28<\/strong>\nIs this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,\nFlames and ether making a rush for my veins,\nTreacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,\nMy flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,\nOn all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,\nStraining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,\nBehaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,\nDepriving me of my best as for a purpose,\nUnbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,\nDeluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,\nImmodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,\nThey bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,\nNo consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,\nFetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,\nThen all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.\n\nThe sentries desert every other part of me,\nThey have left me helpless to a red marauder,\nThey all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.\n\nI am given up by traitors,\nI talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,\nI went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.\n\nYou villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,\nUnclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.\n\n29<\/strong>\nBlind loving wrestling touch, sheath\u2019d hooded sharp-tooth\u2019d touch!\nDid it make you ache so, leaving me?\n\nParting track\u2019d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,\nRich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.\n\nSprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,\nLandscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.\n\n30<\/strong>\nAll truths wait in all things,\nThey neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,\nThey do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,\nThe insignificant is as big to me as any,\n(What is less or more than a touch?)\n\nLogic and sermons never convince,\nThe damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.\n\n(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,\nOnly what nobody denies is so.)\n\nA minute and a drop of me settle my brain,\nI believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,\nAnd a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,\nAnd a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,\nAnd they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,\nAnd until one and all shall delight us, and we them.\n\n31<\/strong>\nI believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,\nAnd the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,\nAnd the tree-toad is a chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre for the highest,\nAnd the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,\nAnd the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,\nAnd the cow crunching with depress\u2019d head surpasses any statue,\nAnd a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.\n\nI find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,\nAnd am stucco\u2019d with quadrupeds and birds all over,\nAnd have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,\nBut call any thing back again when I desire it.\n\nIn vain the speeding or shyness,\nIn vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,\nIn vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder\u2019d bones,\nIn vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,\nIn vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,\nIn vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,\nIn vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,\nIn vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,\nIn vain the razor-bill\u2019d auk sails far north to Labrador,\nI follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.\n\n32<\/strong>\nI think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain\u2019d,\nI stand and look at them long and long.\n\nThey do not sweat and whine about their condition,\nThey do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,\nThey do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,\nNot one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,\nNot one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,\nNot one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.\n\nSo they show their relations to me and I accept them,\nThey bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.\n\nI wonder where they get those tokens,\nDid I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?\n\nMyself moving forward then and now and forever,\nGathering and showing more always and with velocity,\nInfinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,\nNot too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,\nPicking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.\n\nA gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,\nHead high in the forehead, wide between the ears,\nLimbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,\nEyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.\n\nHis nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,\nHis well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.\n\nI but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,\nWhy do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?\nEven as I stand or sit passing faster than you.\n\n33<\/strong>\nSpace and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess\u2019d at,\nWhat I guess\u2019d when I loaf\u2019d on the grass,\nWhat I guess\u2019d while I lay alone in my bed,\nAnd again as I walk\u2019d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.\n\nMy ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,\nI skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,\nI am afoot with my vision.\n\nBy the city\u2019s quadrangular houses\u2014in log huts, camping with lumbermen,\nAlong the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,\nWeeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests,\nProspecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,\nScorch\u2019d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river,\nWhere the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,\nWhere the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish,\nWhere the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,\nWhere the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail;\nOver the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower\u2019d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field,\nOver the sharp-peak\u2019d farm house, with its scallop\u2019d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,\nOver the western persimmon, over the long-leav\u2019d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax,\nOver the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest,\nOver the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;\nScaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs,\nWalking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,\nWhere the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,\nWhere the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,\nWhere the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,\nWhere cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides,\nWhere the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;\nWhere trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,\nWherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,\nWhere the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,)\nWhere the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,\nWhere the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,\nWhere the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,\nWhere the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,\nWhere the half-burn\u2019d brig is riding on unknown currents,\nWhere shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;\nWhere the dense-starr\u2019d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,\nApproaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,\nUnder Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,\nUpon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,\nUpon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,\nAt he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter,\nAt the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw,\nAt apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,\nAt musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;\nWhere the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps,\nWhere the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter\u2019d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,\nWhere the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,\nWhere the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,\nWhere sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,\nWhere herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near,\nWhere the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,\nWhere the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh,\nWhere bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds,\nWhere band-neck\u2019d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out,\nWhere burial coaches enter the arch\u2019d gates of a cemetery,\nWhere winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,\nWhere the yellow-crown\u2019d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs,\nWhere the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,\nWhere the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well,\nThrough patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,\nThrough the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,\nThrough the gymnasium, through the curtain\u2019d saloon, through the office or public hall;\nPleas\u2019d with the native and pleas\u2019d with the foreign, pleas\u2019d with the new and old,\nPleas\u2019d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,\nPleas\u2019d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,\nPleas\u2019d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash\u2019d church,\nPleas\u2019d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress\u2019d seriously at the camp-meeting;\nLooking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,\nWandering the same afternoon with my face turn\u2019d up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach,\nMy right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;\nComing home with the silent and dark-cheek\u2019d bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,)\nFar from the settlements studying the print of animals\u2019 feet, or the moccasin print,\nBy the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,\nNigh the coffin\u2019d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;\nVoyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,\nHurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,\nHot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,\nSolitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,\nWalking the old hills of Jud\u00e6a with the beautiful gentle God by my side,\nSpeeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,\nSpeeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,\nSpeeding with tail\u2019d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,\nCarrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,\nStorming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,\nBacking and filling, appearing and disappearing,\nI tread day and night such roads.\n\nI visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,\nAnd look at quintillions ripen\u2019d and look at quintillions green.\n\nI fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,\nMy course runs below the soundings of plummets.\n\nI help myself to material and immaterial,\nNo guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.\n\nI anchor my ship for a little while only,\nMy messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.\n\nI go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.\n\nI ascend to the foretruck,\nI take my place late at night in the crow\u2019s-nest,\nWe sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,\nThrough the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,\nThe enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions,\nThe white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them,\nWe are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged,\nWe pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution,\nOr we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin\u2019d city,\nThe blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.\n\nI am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,\nI turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,\nI tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.\n\nMy voice is the wife\u2019s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,\nThey fetch my man\u2019s body up dripping and drown\u2019d.\n\nI understand the large hearts of heroes,\nThe courage of present times and all times,\nHow the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,\nHow he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,\nAnd chalk\u2019d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you;\nHow he follow\u2019d with them and tack\u2019d with them three days and would not give it up,\nHow he saved the drifting company at last,\nHow the lank loose-gown\u2019d women look\u2019d when boated from the side of their prepared graves,\nHow the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp\u2019d unshaved men;\nAll this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,\nI am the man, I suffer\u2019d, I was there.\n\nThe disdain and calmness of martyrs,\nThe mother of old, condemn\u2019d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,\nThe hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover\u2019d with sweat,\nThe twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,\nAll these I feel or am.\n\nI am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,\nHell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,\nI clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn\u2019d with the ooze of my skin,\nI fall on the weeds and stones,\nThe riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,\nTaunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.\n\nAgonies are one of my changes of garments,\nI do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,\nMy hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.\n\nI am the mash\u2019d fireman with breast-bone broken,\nTumbling walls buried me in their debris,\nHeat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,\nI heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,\nThey have clear\u2019d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.\n\nI lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,\nPainless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,\nWhite and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps,\nThe kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.\n\nDistant and dead resuscitate,\nThey show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.\n\nI am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort\u2019s bombardment,\nI am there again.\n\nAgain the long roll of the drummers,\nAgain the attacking cannon, mortars,\nAgain to my listening ears the cannon responsive.\n\nI take part, I see and hear the whole,\nThe cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim\u2019d shots,\nThe ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,\nWorkmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,\nThe fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,\nThe whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.\n\nAgain gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand,\nHe gasps through the clot Mind not me\u2014mind\u2014the entrenchments.\n\n34<\/strong>\nNow I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,\n(I tell not the fall of Alamo,\nNot one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,\nThe hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)\n\u2019Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.\n\nRetreating they had form\u2019d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,\nNine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy\u2019s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance,\nTheir colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,\nThey treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv\u2019d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march\u2019d back prisoners of war.\n\nThey were the glory of the race of rangers,\nMatchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,\nLarge, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,\nBearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,\nNot a single one over thirty years of age.\n\nThe second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer,\nThe work commenced about five o\u2019clock and was over by eight.\n\nNone obey\u2019d the command to kneel,\nSome made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,\nA few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together,\nThe maim\u2019d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,\nSome half-kill\u2019d attempted to crawl away,\nThese were despatch\u2019d with bayonets or batter\u2019d with the blunts of muskets,\nA youth not seventeen years old seiz\u2019d his assassin till two more came to release him,\nThe three were all torn and cover\u2019d with the boy\u2019s blood.\n\nAt eleven o\u2019clock began the burning of the bodies;\nThat is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.\n\n35<\/strong>\nWould you hear of an old-time sea-fight?\nWould you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?\nList to the yarn, as my grandmother\u2019s father the sailor told it to me.\n\nOur foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)\nHis was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;\nAlong the lower\u2019d eve he came horribly raking us.\n\nWe closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch\u2019d,\nMy captain lash\u2019d fast with his own hands.\n\nWe had receiv\u2019d some eighteen pound shots under the water,\nOn our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead.\n\nFighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,\nTen o\u2019clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported,\nThe master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves.\n\nThe transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,\nThey see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.\n\nOur frigate takes fire,\nThe other asks if we demand quarter?\nIf our colors are struck and the fighting done?\n\nNow I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,\nWe have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.\n\nOnly three guns are in use,\nOne is directed by the captain himself against the enemy\u2019s mainmast,\nTwo well serv\u2019d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks.\n\nThe tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top,\nThey hold out bravely during the whole of the action.\n\nNot a moment\u2019s cease,\nThe leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.\n\nOne of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.\n\nSerene stands the little captain,\nHe is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,\nHis eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.\n\nToward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.\n\n36<\/strong>\nStretch\u2019d and still lies the midnight,\nTwo great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,\nOur vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer\u2019d,\nThe captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,\nNear by the corpse of the child that serv\u2019d in the cabin,\nThe dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl\u2019d whiskers,\nThe flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,\nThe husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,\nFormless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,\nCut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,\nBlack and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,\nA few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,\nDelicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,\nThe hiss of the surgeon\u2019s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,\nWheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,\nThese so, these irretrievable.\n\n37<\/strong>\nYou laggards there on guard! look to your arms!\nIn at the conquer\u2019d doors they crowd! I am possess\u2019d!\nEmbody all presences outlaw\u2019d or suffering,\nSee myself in prison shaped like another man,\nAnd feel the dull unintermitted pain.\n\nFor me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,\nIt is I let out in the morning and barr\u2019d at night.\n\nNot a mutineer walks handcuff\u2019d to jail but I am handcuff\u2019d to him and walk by his side,\n(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)\n\nNot a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.\n\nNot a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,\nMy face is ash-color\u2019d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.\n\nAskers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,\nI project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.\n\n38<\/strong>\nEnough! enough! enough!\nSomehow I have been stunn\u2019d. Stand back!\nGive me a little time beyond my cuff\u2019d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,\nI discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.\n\nThat I could forget the mockers and insults!\nThat I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!\nThat I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.\n\nI remember now,\nI resume the overstaid fraction,\nThe grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,\nCorpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.\n\nI troop forth replenish\u2019d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,\nInland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,\nOur swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,\nThe blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.\n\nEleves, I salute you! come forward!\nContinue your annotations, continue your questionings.\n\n39<\/strong>\nThe friendly and flowing savage, who is he?\nIs he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?\n\nIs he some Southwesterner rais\u2019d out-doors? is he Kanadian?\nIs he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?\nThe mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?\n\nWherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,\nThey desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.\n\nBehavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb\u2019d head, laughter, and naivet\u00e9,\nSlow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,\nThey descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,\nThey are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes.\n\n40<\/strong>\nFlaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask\u2014lie over!\nYou light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.\n\nEarth! you seem to look for something at my hands,\nSay, old top-knot, what do you want?\n\nMan or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,\nAnd might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,\nAnd might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.\n\nBehold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,\nWhen I give I give myself.\n\nYou there, impotent, loose in the knees,\nOpen your scarf\u2019d chops till I blow grit within you,\nSpread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,\nI am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,\nAnd any thing I have I bestow.\n\nI do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,\nYou can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.\n\nTo cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,\nOn his right cheek I put the family kiss,\nAnd in my soul I swear I never will deny him.\n\nOn women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.\n(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)\n\nTo any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.\nTurn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,\nLet the physician and the priest go home.\n\nI seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,\nO despairer, here is my neck,\nBy God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.\n\nI dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,\nEvery room of the house do I fill with an arm\u2019d force,\nLovers of me, bafflers of graves.\n\nSleep\u2014I and they keep guard all night,\nNot doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,\nI have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,\nAnd when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.\n\n41<\/strong>\nI am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,\nAnd for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.\n\nI heard what was said of the universe,\nHeard it and heard it of several thousand years;\nIt is middling well as far as it goes\u2014but is that all?\n\nMagnifying and applying come I,\nOutbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,\nTaking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,\nLithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,\nBuying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,\nIn my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,\nWith Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,\nTaking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,\nAdmitting they were alive and did the work of their days,\n(They bore mites as for unfledg\u2019d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)\nAccepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,\nDiscovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,\nPutting higher claims for him there with his roll\u2019d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel,\nNot objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,\nLads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,\nMinding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,\nTheir brawny limbs passing safe over charr\u2019d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;\nBy the mechanic\u2019s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born,\nThree scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg\u2019d out at their waists,\nThe snag-tooth\u2019d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,\nSelling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;\nWhat was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then,\nThe bull and the bug never worshipp\u2019d half enough,\nDung and dirt more admirable than was dream\u2019d,\nThe supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,\nThe day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;\nBy my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,\nPutting myself here and now to the ambush\u2019d womb of the shadows.\n\n42<\/strong>\nA call in the midst of the crowd,\nMy own voice, orotund sweeping and final.\n\nCome my children,\nCome my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,\nNow the performer launches his nerve, he has pass\u2019d his prelude on the reeds within.\n\nEasily written loose-finger\u2019d chords\u2014I feel the thrum of your climax and close.\n\nMy head slues round on my neck,\nMusic rolls, but not from the organ,\nFolks are around me, but they are no household of mine.\n\nEver the hard unsunk ground,\nEver the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,\nEver myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,\nEver the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn\u2019d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,\nEver the vexer\u2019s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,\nEver love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,\nEver the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.\n\nHere and there with dimes on the eyes walking,\nTo feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,\nTickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,\nMany sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,\nA few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.\n\nThis is the city and I am one of the citizens,\nWhatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,\nThe mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.\n\nThe little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail\u2019d coats,\nI am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)\nI acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,\nWhat I do and say the same waits for them,\nEvery thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.\n\nI know perfectly well my own egotism,\nKnow my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,\nAnd would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.\n\nNot words of routine this song of mine,\nBut abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;\nThis printed and bound book\u2014but the printer and the printing-office boy?\nThe well-taken photographs\u2014but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?\nThe black ship mail\u2019d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets\u2014but the pluck of the captain and engineers?\nIn the houses the dishes and fare and furniture\u2014but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?\nThe sky up there\u2014yet here or next door, or across the way?\nThe saints and sages in history\u2014but you yourself?\nSermons, creeds, theology\u2014but the fathomless human brain,\nAnd what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?\n\n43<\/strong>\nI do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,\nMy faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,\nEnclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,\nBelieving I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,\nWaiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,\nMaking a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis,\nHelping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,\nDancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,\nDrinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,\nWalking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,\nAccepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine,\nTo the mass kneeling or the puritan\u2019s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew,\nRanting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me,\nLooking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,\nBelonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.\n\nOne of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey.\n\nDown-hearted doubters dull and excluded,\nFrivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten\u2019d, atheistical,\nI know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.\n\nHow the flukes splash!\nHow they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!\n\nBe at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,\nI take my place among you as much as among any,\nThe past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,\nAnd what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.\n\nI do not know what is untried and afterward,\nBut I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.\n\nEach who passes is consider\u2019d, each who stops is consider\u2019d, not a single one can it fail.\n\nIt cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,\nNor the young woman who died and was put by his side,\nNor the little child that peep\u2019d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again,\nNor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall,\nNor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,\nNor the numberless slaughter\u2019d and wreck\u2019d, nor the brutish koboo call\u2019d the ordure of humanity,\nNor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,\nNor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,\nNor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them,\nNor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.\n\n44<\/strong>\nIt is time to explain myself\u2014let us stand up.\n\nWhat is known I strip away,\nI launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.\n\nThe clock indicates the moment\u2014but what does eternity indicate?\n\nWe have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,\nThere are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.\n\nBirths have brought us richness and variety,\nAnd other births will bring us richness and variety.\n\nI do not call one greater and one smaller,\nThat which fills its period and place is equal to any.\n\nWere mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?\nI am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,\nAll has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,\n(What have I to do with lamentation?)\n\nI am an acme of things accomplish\u2019d, and I an encloser of things to be.\n\nMy feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,\nOn every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,\nAll below duly travel\u2019d, and still I mount and mount.\n\nRise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,\nAfar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,\nI waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,\nAnd took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.\n\nLong I was hugg\u2019d close\u2014long and long.\n\nImmense have been the preparations for me,\nFaithful and friendly the arms that have help\u2019d me.\n\nCycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,\nFor room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,\nThey sent influences to look after what was to hold me.\n\nBefore I was born out of my mother generations guided me,\nMy embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.\n\nFor it the nebula cohered to an orb,\nThe long slow strata piled to rest it on,\nVast vegetables gave it sustenance,\nMonstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.\n\nAll forces have been steadily employ\u2019d to complete and delight me,\nNow on this spot I stand with my robust soul.\n\n45<\/strong>\nO span of youth! ever-push\u2019d elasticity!\nO manhood, balanced, florid and full.\n\nMy lovers suffocate me,\nCrowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,\nJostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,\nCrying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,\nCalling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,\nLighting on every moment of my life,\nBussing my body with soft balsamic busses,\nNoiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.\n\nOld age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!\n\nEvery condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,\nAnd the dark hush promulges as much as any.\n\nI open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,\nAnd all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.\n\nWider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,\nOutward and outward and forever outward.\n\nMy sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,\nHe joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,\nAnd greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.\n\nThere is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,\nIf I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run,\nWe should surely bring up again where we now stand,\nAnd surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.\n\nA few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,\nThey are but parts, any thing is but a part.\n\nSee ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,\nCount ever so much, there is limitless time around that.\n\nMy rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,\nThe Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,\nThe great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.\n\n46<\/strong>\nI know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.\n\nI tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)\nMy signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,\nNo friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,\nI have no chair, no church, no philosophy,\nI lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,\nBut each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,\nMy left hand hooking you round the waist,\nMy right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.\n\nNot I, not any one else can travel that road for you,\nYou must travel it for yourself.\n\nIt is not far, it is within reach,\nPerhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,\nPerhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.\n\nShoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,\nWonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.\n\nIf you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,\nAnd in due time you shall repay the same service to me,\nFor after we start we never lie by again.\n\nThis day before dawn I ascended a hill and look\u2019d at the crowded heaven,\nAnd I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill\u2019d and satisfied then?\nAnd my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.\n\nYou are also asking me questions and I hear you,\nI answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.\n\nSit a while dear son,\nHere are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,\nBut as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.\n\nLong enough have you dream\u2019d contemptible dreams,\nNow I wash the gum from your eyes,\nYou must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.\n\nLong have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,\nNow I will you to be a bold swimmer,\nTo jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.\n\n47<\/strong>\nI am the teacher of athletes,\nHe that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,\nHe most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.\n\nThe boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,\nWicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,\nFond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,\nUnrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,\nFirst-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull\u2019s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,\nPreferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers,\nAnd those well-tann\u2019d to those that keep out of the sun.\n\nI teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?\nI follow you whoever you are from the present hour,\nMy words itch at your ears till you understand them.\n\nI do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,\n(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,\nTied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen\u2019d.)\n\nI swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,\nAnd I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.\n\nIf you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,\nThe nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,\nThe maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.\n\nNo shutter\u2019d room or school can commune with me,\nBut roughs and little children better than they.\n\nThe young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,\nThe woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day,\nThe farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,\nIn vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them.\n\nThe soldier camp\u2019d or upon the march is mine,\nOn the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,\nOn that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.\n\nMy face rubs to the hunter\u2019s face when he lies down alone in his blanket,\nThe driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,\nThe young mother and old mother comprehend me,\nThe girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,\nThey and all would resume what I have told them.\n\n48<\/strong>\nI have said that the soul is not more than the body,\nAnd I have said that the body is not more than the soul,\nAnd nothing, not God, is greater to one than one\u2019s self is,\nAnd whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,\nAnd I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,\nAnd to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,\nAnd there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,\nAnd there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel\u2019d universe,\nAnd I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.\n\nAnd I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,\nFor I who am curious about each am not curious about God,\n(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)\n\nI hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,\nNor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.\n\nWhy should I wish to see God better than this day?\nI see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,\nIn the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,\nI find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign\u2019d by God\u2019s name,\nAnd I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe\u2019er I go,\nOthers will punctually come for ever and ever.\n\n49<\/strong>\nAnd as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.\n\nTo his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,\nI see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,\nI recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,\nAnd mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.\n\nAnd as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,\nI smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,\nI reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish\u2019d breasts of melons.\n\nAnd as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,\n(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)\n\nI hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,\nO suns\u2014O grass of graves\u2014O perpetual transfers and promotions,\nIf you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?\n\nOf the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,\nOf the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,\nToss, sparkles of day and dusk\u2014toss on the black stems that decay in the muck,\nToss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.\n\nI ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,\nI perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,\nAnd debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.\n\n50<\/strong>\nThere is that in me\u2014I do not know what it is\u2014but I know it is in me.\n\nWrench\u2019d and sweaty\u2014calm and cool then my body becomes,\nI sleep\u2014I sleep long.\n\nI do not know it\u2014it is without name\u2014it is a word unsaid,\nIt is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.\n\nSomething it swings on more than the earth I swing on,\nTo it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.\n\nPerhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.\n\nDo you see O my brothers and sisters?\nIt is not chaos or death\u2014it is form, union, plan\u2014it is eternal life\u2014it is Happiness.\n\n51<\/strong>\nThe past and present wilt\u2014I have fill\u2019d them, emptied them,\nAnd proceed to fill my next fold of the future.\n\nListener up there! what have you to confide to me?\nLook in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,\n(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)\n\nDo I contradict myself?\nVery well then I contradict myself,\n(I am large, I contain multitudes.)\n\nI concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.\n\nWho has done his day\u2019s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?\nWho wishes to walk with me?\n\nWill you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?\n\n52<\/strong>\nThe spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.\n\nI too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,\nI sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.\n\nThe last scud of day holds back for me,\nIt flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow\u2019d wilds,\nIt coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.\n\nI depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,\nI effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.\n\nI bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,\nIf you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.\n\nYou will hardly know who I am or what I mean,\nBut I shall be good health to you nevertheless,\nAnd filter and fibre your blood.\n\nFailing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,\nMissing me one place search another,\nI stop somewhere waiting for you.\n

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom\u2019d<\/h1>\n1<\/strong>\nWhen lilacs last in the dooryard bloom\u2019d,\nAnd the great star early droop\u2019d in the western sky in the night,\nI mourn\u2019d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.\n\nEver-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,\nLilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,\nAnd thought of him I love.\n\n2<\/strong>\nO powerful western fallen star!\nO shades of night\u2014O moody, tearful night!\nO great star disappear\u2019d\u2014O the black murk that hides the star!\nO cruel hands that hold me powerless\u2014O helpless soul of me!\nO harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.\n\n3<\/strong>\nIn the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash\u2019d palings,\nStands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,\nWith many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,\nWith every leaf a miracle\u2014and from this bush in the dooryard,\nWith delicate-color\u2019d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,\nA sprig with its flower I break.\n\n4<\/strong>\nIn the swamp in secluded recesses,\nA shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.\n\nSolitary the thrush,\nThe hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,\nSings by himself a song.\n\nSong of the bleeding throat,\nDeath\u2019s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,\nIf thou wast not granted to sing thou would\u2019st surely die.)\n\n5<\/strong>\nOver the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,\nAmid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep\u2019d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,\nAmid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,\nPassing the yellow-spear\u2019d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,\nPassing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,\nCarrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,\nNight and day journeys a coffin.\n\n6<\/strong>\nCoffin that passes through lanes and streets,\nThrough day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,\nWith the pomp of the inloop\u2019d flags with the cities draped in black,\nWith the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil\u2019d women standing,\nWith processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,\nWith the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,\nWith the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,\nWith dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,\nWith all the mournful voices of the dirges pour\u2019d around the coffin,\nThe dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs\u2014where amid these you journey,\nWith the tolling tolling bells\u2019 perpetual clang,\nHere, coffin that slowly passes,\nI give you my sprig of lilac.\n\n7<\/strong>\n(Nor for you, for one alone,\nBlossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,\nFor fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.\n\nAll over bouquets of roses,\nO death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,\nBut mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,\nCopious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,\nWith loaded arms I come, pouring for you,\nFor you and the coffins all of you O death.)\n\n8<\/strong>\nO western orb sailing the heaven,\nNow I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk\u2019d,\nAs I walk\u2019d in silence the transparent shadowy night,\nAs I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,\nAs you droop\u2019d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look\u2019d on,)\nAs we wander\u2019d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)\nAs the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,\nAs I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,\nAs I watch\u2019d where you pass\u2019d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,\nAs my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,\nConcluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.\n\n9<\/strong>\nSing on there in the swamp,\nO singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,\nI hear, I come presently, I understand you,\nBut a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain\u2019d me,\nThe star my departing comrade holds and detains me.\n\n10<\/strong>\nO how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?\nAnd how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?\nAnd what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?\n\nSea-winds blown from east and west,\nBlown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,\nThese and with these and the breath of my chant,\nI\u2019ll perfume the grave of him I love.\n\n11<\/strong>\nO what shall I hang on the chamber walls?\nAnd what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,\nTo adorn the burial-house of him I love?\n\nPictures of growing spring and farms and homes,\nWith the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,\nWith floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,\nWith the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,\nIn the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,\nWith ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows,\nAnd the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,\nAnd all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.\n\n12<\/strong>\nLo, body and soul\u2014this land,\nMy own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,\nThe varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio\u2019s shores and flashing Missouri,\nAnd ever the far-spreading prairies cover\u2019d with grass and corn.\n\nLo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,\nThe violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,\nThe gentle soft-born measureless light,\nThe miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill\u2019d noon,\nThe coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,\nOver my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.\n\n13<\/strong>\nSing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,\nSing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,\nLimitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.\n\nSing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,\nLoud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.\n\nO liquid and free and tender!\nO wild and loose to my soul\u2014O wondrous singer!\nYou only I hear\u2014yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)\nYet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.\n\n14<\/strong>\nNow while I sat in the day and look\u2019d forth,\nIn the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,\nIn the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,\nIn the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb\u2019d winds and the storms,)\nUnder the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,\nThe many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail\u2019d,\nAnd the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,\nAnd the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,\nAnd the streets how their throbbings throbb\u2019d, and the cities pent\u2014lo, then and there,\nFalling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,\nAppear\u2019d the cloud, appear\u2019d the long black trail,\nAnd I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.\n\nThen with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,\nAnd the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,\nAnd I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,\nI fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,\nDown to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,\nTo the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.\n\nAnd the singer so shy to the rest receiv\u2019d me,\nThe gray-brown bird I know receiv\u2019d us comrades three,\nAnd he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.\n\nFrom deep secluded recesses,\nFrom the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,\nCame the carol of the bird.\n\nAnd the charm of the carol rapt me,\nAs I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,\nAnd the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.\n\nCome lovely and soothing death,\nUndulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,\nIn the day, in the night, to all, to each,\nSooner or later delicate death.<\/em>\n\nPrais\u2019d be the fathomless universe,\nFor life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,\nAnd for love, sweet love\u2014but praise! praise! praise!\nFor the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.\n\nDark mother always gliding near with soft feet,\nHave none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?\nThen I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,\nI bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.\n\nApproach strong deliveress,\nWhen it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,\nLost in the loving floating ocean of thee,\nLaved in the flood of thy bliss O death.\n\nFrom me to thee glad serenades,\nDances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,\nAnd the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,\nAnd life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.\n\nThe night in silence under many a star,\nThe ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,\nAnd the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil\u2019d death,\nAnd the body gratefully nestling close to thee.\n\nOver the tree-tops I float thee a song,\nOver the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,\nOver the dense-pack\u2019d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,\nI float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.\n\n15<\/strong>\nTo the tally of my soul,\nLoud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,\nWith pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.\n\nLoud in the pines and cedars dim,\nClear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,\nAnd I with my comrades there in the night.\n\nWhile my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,\nAs to long panoramas of visions.\n\nAnd I saw askant the armies,\nI saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,\nBorne through the smoke of the battles and pierc\u2019d with missiles I saw them,\nAnd carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,\nAnd at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)\nAnd the staffs all splinter\u2019d and broken.\n\nI saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,\nAnd the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,\nI saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,\nBut I saw they were not as was thought,\nThey themselves were fully at rest, they suffer\u2019d not,\nThe living remain\u2019d and suffer\u2019d, the mother suffer\u2019d,\nAnd the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer\u2019d,\nAnd the armies that remain\u2019d suffer\u2019d.\n\n16<\/strong>\nPassing the visions, passing the night,\nPassing, unloosing the hold of my comrades\u2019 hands,\nPassing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,\nVictorious song, death\u2019s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,\nAs low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,\nSadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,\nCovering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,\nAs that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,\nPassing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,\nI leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.\n\nI cease from my song for thee,\nFrom my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,\nO comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.\n\nYet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,\nThe song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,\nAnd the tallying chant, the echo arous\u2019d in my soul,\nWith the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,\nWith the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,\nComrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,\nFor the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands\u2014and this for his dear sake,\nLilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,\nThere in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.\n

Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand<\/h1>\nWhoever you are holding me now in hand,\nWithout one thing all will be useless,\nI give you fair warning before you attempt me further,\nI am not what you supposed, but far different.\n\nWho is he that would become my follower?\nWho would sign himself a candidate for my affections?\n\nThe way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,\nYou would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,\nYour novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,\nThe whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon\u2019d,\nTherefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,\nPut me down and depart on your way.\n\nOr else by stealth in some wood for trial,\nOr back of a rock in the open air,\n(For in any roof\u2019d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,\nAnd in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)\nBut just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,\nOr possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,\nHere to put your lips upon mine I permit you,\nWith the comrade\u2019s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband\u2019s kiss,\nFor I am the new husband and I am the comrade.\n\nOr if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,\nWhere I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,\nCarry me when you go forth over land or sea;\nFor thus merely touching you is enough, is best,\nAnd thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.\n\nBut these leaves conning you con at peril,\nFor these leaves and me you will not understand,\nThey will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you,\nEven while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!\nAlready you see I have escaped from you.\n\nFor it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,\nNor is it by reading it you will acquire it,\nNor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,\nNor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,\nNor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,\nFor all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;\nTherefore release me and depart on your way.\n

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking<\/h1>\nOut of the cradle endlessly rocking,\nOut of the mocking-bird\u2019s throat, the musical shuttle,\nOut of the Ninth-month midnight,\nOver the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander\u2019d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,\nDown from the shower\u2019d halo,\nUp from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,\nOut from the patches of briers and blackberries,\nFrom the memories of the bird that chanted to me,\nFrom your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,\nFrom under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,\nFrom those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,\nFrom the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,\nFrom the myriad thence-arous\u2019d words,\nFrom the word stronger and more delicious than any,\nFrom such as now they start the scene revisiting,\nAs a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,\nBorne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,\nA man, yet by these tears a little boy again,\nThrowing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,\nI, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,\nTaking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,\nA reminiscence sing.\n\nOnce Paumanok,\nWhen the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,\nUp this seashore in some briers,\nTwo feather\u2019d guests from Alabama, two together,\nAnd their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,\nAnd every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,\nAnd every day the she-bird crouch\u2019d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,\nAnd every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,\nCautiously peering, absorbing, translating.\n\nShine! shine! shine!\nPour down your warmth, great sun!\nWhile we bask, we two together.<\/em>\n\nTwo together!\nWinds blow south, or winds blow north,\nDay come white, or night come black,\nHome, or rivers and mountains from home,\nSinging all time, minding no time,\nWhile we two keep together.\n\nTill of a sudden,\nMay-be kill\u2019d, unknown to her mate,\nOne forenoon the she-bird crouch\u2019d not on the nest,\nNor return\u2019d that afternoon, nor the next,\nNor ever appear\u2019d again.\n\nAnd thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,\nAnd at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,\nOver the hoarse surging of the sea,\nOr flitting from brier to brier by day,\nI saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,\nThe solitary guest from Alabama.\n\nBlow! blow! blow!\nBlow up sea-winds along Paumanok\u2019s shore;\nI wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.<\/em>\n\nYes, when the stars glisten\u2019d,\nAll night long on the prong of a moss-scallop\u2019d stake,\nDown almost amid the slapping waves,\nSat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.\n\nHe call\u2019d on his mate,\nHe pour\u2019d forth the meanings which I of all men know.\n\nYes my brother I know,\nThe rest might not, but I have treasur\u2019d every note,\nFor more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,\nSilent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,\nRecalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,\nThe white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,\nI, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,\nListen\u2019d long and long.\n\nListen\u2019d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,\nFollowing you my brother.\n\nSoothe! soothe! soothe!<\/em>\nClose on its wave soothes the wave behind,<\/em>\nAnd again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,<\/em>\nBut my love soothes not me, not me.<\/em>\n\nLow hangs the moon, it rose late,<\/em>\nIt is lagging\u2014O I think it is heavy with love, with love.<\/em>\n\nO madly the sea pushes upon the land,<\/em>\nWith love, with love.<\/em>\n\nO night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?<\/em>\nWhat is that little black thing I see there in the white?<\/em>\n\nLoud! loud! loud!<\/em>\nLoud I call to you, my love!<\/em>\n\nHigh and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,<\/em>\nSurely you must know who is here, is here,<\/em>\nYou must know who I am, my love.<\/em>\n\nLow-hanging moon!<\/em>\nWhat is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?<\/em>\nO it is the shape, the shape of my mate!<\/em>\nO moon do not keep her from me any longer.<\/em>\n\nLand! land! O land!<\/em>\nWhichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again if you only would,<\/em>\nFor I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.<\/em>\n\nO rising stars!<\/em>\nPerhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.<\/em>\n\nO throat! O trembling throat!<\/em>\nSound clearer through the atmosphere!<\/em>\nPierce the woods, the earth,<\/em>\nSomewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.<\/em>\n\nShake out carols!<\/em>\nSolitary here, the night\u2019s carols!<\/em>\nCarols of lonesome love! death\u2019s carols!<\/em>\nCarols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!<\/em>\nO under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!<\/em>\nO reckless despairing carols.<\/em>\n\nBut soft! sink low!<\/em>\nSoft! let me just murmur,<\/em>\nAnd do you wait a moment you husky-nois\u2019d sea,<\/em>\nFor somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,<\/em>\nSo faint, I must be still, be still to listen,<\/em>\nBut not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.<\/em>\n\nHither my love!<\/em>\nHere I am! here!<\/em>\nWith this just-sustain\u2019d note I announce myself to you,<\/em>\nThis gentle call is for you my love, for you.<\/em>\n\nDo not be decoy\u2019d elsewhere,<\/em>\nThat is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,<\/em>\nThat is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,<\/em>\nThose are the shadows of leaves.<\/em>\n\nO darkness! O in vain!<\/em>\nO I am very sick and sorrowful.<\/em>\n\nO brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!<\/em>\nO troubled reflection in the sea!<\/em>\nO throat! O throbbing heart!<\/em>\nAnd I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.<\/em>\n\nO past! O happy life! O songs of joy!<\/em>\nIn the air, in the woods, over fields,<\/em>\nLoved! loved! loved! loved! loved!<\/em>\nBut my mate no more, no more with me!<\/em>\nWe two together no more.<\/em>\n\nThe aria sinking,\nAll else continuing, the stars shining,\nThe winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,\nWith angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,\nOn the sands of Paumanok\u2019s shore gray and rustling,\nThe yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching,\nThe boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,\nThe love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,\nThe aria\u2019s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,\nThe strange tears down the cheeks coursing,\nThe colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,\nThe undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,\nTo the boy\u2019s soul\u2019s questions sullenly timing, some drown\u2019d secret hissing,\nTo the outsetting bard.\n\nDemon or bird! (said the boy\u2019s soul,)\nIs it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?\nFor I, that was a child, my tongue\u2019s use sleeping, now I have heard you,\nNow in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,\nAnd already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,\nA thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.\n\nO you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,\nO solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,\nNever more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,\nNever more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,\nNever again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,\nBy the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,\nThe messenger there arous\u2019d, the fire, the sweet hell within,\nThe unknown want, the destiny of me.\n\nO give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)\nO if I am to have so much, let me have more!\n\nA word then, (for I will conquer it,)\nThe word final, superior to all,\nSubtle, sent up\u2014what is it?\u2014I listen;\nAre you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?\nIs that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?\n\nWhereto answering, the sea,\nDelaying not, hurrying not,\nWhisper\u2019d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,\n\nLisp\u2019d to me the low and delicious word death,\nAnd again death, death, death, death,\nHissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous\u2019d child\u2019s heart,\nBut edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,\nCreeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,\nDeath, death, death, death, death.\n\nWhich I do not forget,\nBut fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,\nThat he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok\u2019s gray beach,\nWith the thousand responsive songs at random,\nMy own songs awaked from that hour,\nAnd with them the key, the word up from the waves,\nThe word of the sweetest song and all songs,\nThat strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,\n(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)\nThe sea whisper\u2019d me.\n\n
\n\n

Sources<\/h2>\n\"Song of Myself\" by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.\n\n\u201cWhen Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom\u2019d\u201d by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.\n\n\u201cWhoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand\u201d by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.\n\n\u201cOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking\u201d by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.\n\n ","rendered":"

Song of Myself<\/h1>\n

1<\/strong>
\nI celebrate myself, and sing myself,
\nAnd what I assume you shall assume,
\nFor every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.<\/p>\n

I loafe and invite my soul,
\nI lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.<\/p>\n

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form\u2019d from this soil, this air,
\nBorn here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
\nI, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
\nHoping to cease not till death.<\/p>\n

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
\nRetiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
\nI harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
\nNature without check with original energy.<\/p>\n

2<\/strong>
\nHouses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
\nI breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
\nThe distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.<\/p>\n

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
\nIt is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
\nI will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
\nI am mad for it to be in contact with me.<\/p>\n

The smoke of my own breath,
\nEchoes, ripples, buzz\u2019d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
\nMy respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
\nThe sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color\u2019d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
\nThe sound of the belch\u2019d words of my voice loos\u2019d to the eddies of the wind,
\nA few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
\nThe play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
\nThe delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
\nThe feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.<\/p>\n

Have you reckon\u2019d a thousand acres much? have you reckon\u2019d the earth much?
\nHave you practis\u2019d so long to learn to read?
\nHave you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?<\/p>\n

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
\nYou shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
\nYou shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
\nYou shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
\nYou shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.<\/p>\n

3<\/strong>
\nI have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
\nBut I do not talk of the beginning or the end.<\/p>\n

There was never any more inception than there is now,
\nNor any more youth or age than there is now,
\nAnd will never be any more perfection than there is now,
\nNor any more heaven or hell than there is now.<\/p>\n

Urge and urge and urge,
\nAlways the procreant urge of the world.<\/p>\n

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
\nAlways a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.<\/p>\n

To elaborate is no avail, learn\u2019d and unlearn\u2019d feel that it is so.<\/p>\n

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
\nStout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
\nI and this mystery here we stand.<\/p>\n

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.<\/p>\n

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
\nTill that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.<\/p>\n

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
\nKnowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.<\/p>\n

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
\nNot an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.<\/p>\n

I am satisfied\u2014I see, dance, laugh, sing;
\nAs the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
\nLeaving me baskets cover\u2019d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
\nShall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
\nThat they turn from gazing after and down the road,
\nAnd forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
\nExactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?<\/p>\n

4<\/strong>
\nTrippers and askers surround me,
\nPeople I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
\nThe latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
\nMy dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
\nThe real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
\nThe sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
\nBattles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
\nThese come to me days and nights and go from me again,
\nBut they are not the Me myself.<\/p>\n

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
\nStands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
\nLooks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
\nLooking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
\nBoth in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.<\/p>\n

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
\nI have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.<\/p>\n

5<\/strong>
\nI believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
\nAnd you must not be abased to the other.<\/p>\n

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
\nNot words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
\nOnly the lull I like, the hum of your valv\u00e8d voice.<\/p>\n

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
\nHow you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn\u2019d over upon me,
\nAnd parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
\nAnd reach\u2019d till you felt my beard, and reach\u2019d till you held my feet.<\/p>\n

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
\nAnd I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
\nAnd I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
\nAnd that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
\nAnd that a kelson of the creation is love,
\nAnd limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
\nAnd brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
\nAnd mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap\u2019d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.<\/p>\n

6<\/strong>
\nA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
\nHow could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.<\/p>\n

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.<\/p>\n

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
\nA scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
\nBearing the owner\u2019s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?<\/p>\n

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.<\/p>\n

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
\nAnd it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
\nGrowing among black folks as among white,
\nKanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.<\/p>\n

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.<\/p>\n

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
\nIt may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
\nIt may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
\nIt may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers\u2019 laps,
\nAnd here you are the mothers\u2019 laps.<\/p>\n

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
\nDarker than the colorless beards of old men,
\nDark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.<\/p>\n

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
\nAnd I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.<\/p>\n

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
\nAnd the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.<\/p>\n

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
\nAnd what do you think has become of the women and children?<\/p>\n

They are alive and well somewhere,
\nThe smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
\nAnd if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
\nAnd ceas\u2019d the moment life appear\u2019d.<\/p>\n

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
\nAnd to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.<\/p>\n

7<\/strong>
\nHas any one supposed it lucky to be born?
\nI hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.<\/p>\n

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash\u2019d babe, and am not contain\u2019d between my hat and boots,
\nAnd peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
\nThe earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.<\/p>\n

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
\nI am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
\n(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)<\/p>\n

Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
\nFor me those that have been boys and that love women,
\nFor me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
\nFor me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
\nFor me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
\nFor me children and the begetters of children.<\/p>\n

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
\nI see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
\nAnd am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.<\/p>\n

8<\/strong>
\nThe little one sleeps in its cradle,
\nI lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.<\/p>\n

The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
\nI peeringly view them from the top.<\/p>\n

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
\nI witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.<\/p>\n

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
\nThe heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
\nThe snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
\nThe hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous\u2019d mobs,
\nThe flap of the curtain\u2019d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
\nThe meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
\nThe excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
\nThe impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
\nWhat groans of over-fed or half-starv\u2019d who fall sunstruck or in fits,
\nWhat exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
\nWhat living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain\u2019d by decorum,
\nArrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
\nI mind them or the show or resonance of them\u2014I come and I depart.<\/p>\n

9<\/strong>
\nThe big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
\nThe dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
\nThe clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
\nThe armfuls are pack\u2019d to the sagging mow.<\/p>\n

I am there, I help, I came stretch\u2019d atop of the load,
\nI felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
\nI jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
\nAnd roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.<\/p>\n

10<\/strong>
\nAlone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
\nWandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
\nIn the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
\nKindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill\u2019d game,
\nFalling asleep on the gather\u2019d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.<\/p>\n

The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,<\/p>\n

My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.<\/p>\n

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
\nI tuck\u2019d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
\nYou should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.<\/p>\n

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,
\nHer father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders,
\nOn a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,
\nShe had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach\u2019d to her feet.<\/p>\n

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
\nI heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
\nThrough the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
\nAnd went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
\nAnd brought water and fill\u2019d a tub for his sweated body and bruis\u2019d feet,
\nAnd gave him a room that enter\u2019d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
\nAnd remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
\nAnd remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
\nHe staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass\u2019d north,
\nI had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean\u2019d in the corner.<\/p>\n

11<\/strong>
\nTwenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
\nTwenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
\nTwenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.<\/p>\n

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
\nShe hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.<\/p>\n

Which of the young men does she like the best?
\nAh the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.<\/p>\n

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
\nYou splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.<\/p>\n

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
\nThe rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.<\/p>\n

The beards of the young men glisten\u2019d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
\nLittle streams pass\u2019d all over their bodies.<\/p>\n

An unseen hand also pass\u2019d over their bodies,
\nIt descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.<\/p>\n

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
\nThey do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
\nThey do not think whom they souse with spray.<\/p>\n

12<\/strong>
\nThe butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,
\nI loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.<\/p>\n

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
\nEach has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.<\/p>\n

From the cinder-strew\u2019d threshold I follow their movements,
\nThe lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
\nOverhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
\nThey do not hasten, each man hits in his place.<\/p>\n

13<\/strong>
\nThe negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,
\nThe negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois\u2019d on one leg on the string-piece,
\nHis blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band,
\nHis glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,
\nThe sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish\u2019d and perfect limbs.<\/p>\n

I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,
\nI go with the team also.<\/p>\n

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,
\nTo niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,
\nAbsorbing all to myself and for this song.<\/p>\n

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
\nIt seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.<\/p>\n

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
\nThey rise together, they slowly circle around.<\/p>\n

I believe in those wing\u2019d purposes,
\nAnd acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
\nAnd consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
\nAnd do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
\nAnd the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
\nAnd the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.<\/p>\n

14<\/strong>
\nThe wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
\nYa-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
\nThe pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
\nFind its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.<\/p>\n

The sharp-hoof\u2019d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,
\nThe litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
\nThe brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,
\nI see in them and myself the same old law.<\/p>\n

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
\nThey scorn the best I can do to relate them.<\/p>\n

I am enamour\u2019d of growing out-doors,
\nOf men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
\nOf the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,
\nI can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.<\/p>\n

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
\nMe going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
\nAdorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
\nNot asking the sky to come down to my good will,
\nScattering it freely forever.<\/p>\n

15<\/strong>
\nThe pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
\nThe carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
\nThe married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
\nThe pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
\nThe mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,<\/p>\n

The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
\nThe deacons are ordain\u2019d with cross\u2019d hands at the altar,
\nThe spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
\nThe farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,
\nThe lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm\u2019d case,
\n(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother\u2019s bed-room;)
\nThe jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
\nHe turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
\nThe malform\u2019d limbs are tied to the surgeon\u2019s table,
\nWhat is removed drops horribly in a pail;
\nThe quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,
\nThe machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,
\nThe young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)
\nThe half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
\nThe western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,
\nOut from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;
\nThe groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
\nAs the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,
\nThe bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,
\nThe youth lies awake in the cedar-roof\u2019d garret and harks to the musical rain,
\nThe Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
\nThe squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm\u2019d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,
\nThe connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,
\nAs the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,
\nThe young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,
\nThe one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,
\nThe clean-hair\u2019d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,
\nThe paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter\u2019s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold,
\nThe canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,
\nThe conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,
\nThe child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
\nThe regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)
\nThe drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,
\nThe pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)
\nThe bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,
\nThe opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open\u2019d lips,
\nThe prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
\nThe crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
\n(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
\nThe President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,
\nOn the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,
\nThe crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,
\nThe Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,
\nAs the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change,
\nThe floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
\nIn single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
\nSeasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather\u2019d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
\nSeasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground;
\nOff on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,
\nThe stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,
\nFlatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,
\nCoon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain\u2019d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
\nTorches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,<\/p>\n

Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,
\nIn walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day\u2019s sport,
\nThe city sleeps and the country sleeps,
\nThe living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
\nThe old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
\nAnd these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
\nAnd such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
\nAnd of these one and all I weave the song of myself.<\/p>\n

16<\/strong>
\nI am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
\nRegardless of others, ever regardful of others,
\nMaternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
\nStuff\u2019d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff\u2019d with the stuff that is fine,
\nOne of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
\nA Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
\nA Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
\nA Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
\nA boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
\nAt home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,
\nAt home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
\nAt home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,
\nComrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)
\nComrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,
\nA learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
\nA novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
\nOf every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
\nA farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
\nPrisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.<\/p>\n

I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
\nBreathe the air but leave plenty after me,
\nAnd am not stuck up, and am in my place.<\/p>\n

(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
\nThe bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
\nThe palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)<\/p>\n

17<\/strong>
\nThese are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
\nIf they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
\nIf they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
\nIf they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.<\/p>\n

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
\nThis the common air that bathes the globe.<\/p>\n

18<\/strong>
\nWith music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
\nI play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer\u2019d and slain persons.<\/p>\n

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
\nI also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.<\/p>\n

I beat and pound for the dead,
\nI blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.<\/p>\n

Vivas to those who have fail\u2019d!
\nAnd to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
\nAnd to those themselves who sank in the sea!
\nAnd to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
\nAnd the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!<\/p>\n

19<\/strong>
\nThis is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
\nIt is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
\nI will not have a single person slighted or left away,
\nThe kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
\nThe heavy-lipp\u2019d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
\nThere shall be no difference between them and the rest.<\/p>\n

This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
\nThis the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
\nThis the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
\nThis the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.<\/p>\n

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
\nWell I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.<\/p>\n

Do you take it I would astonish?
\nDoes the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?
\nDo I astonish more than they?<\/p>\n

This hour I tell things in confidence,
\nI might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.<\/p>\n

20<\/strong>
\nWho goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
\nHow is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?<\/p>\n

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?<\/p>\n

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
\nElse it were time lost listening to me.<\/p>\n

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
\nThat months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.<\/p>\n

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov\u2019d,
\nI wear my hat as I please indoors or out.<\/p>\n

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?<\/p>\n

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel\u2019d with doctors and calculated close,
\nI find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.<\/p>\n

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
\nAnd the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.<\/p>\n

I know I am solid and sound,
\nTo me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
\nAll are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.<\/p>\n

I know I am deathless,
\nI know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter\u2019s compass,
\nI know I shall not pass like a child\u2019s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.<\/p>\n

I know I am august,
\nI do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
\nI see that the elementary laws never apologize,
\n(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)<\/p>\n

I exist as I am, that is enough,
\nIf no other in the world be aware I sit content,
\nAnd if each and all be aware I sit content.<\/p>\n

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
\nAnd whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
\nI can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.<\/p>\n

My foothold is tenon\u2019d and mortis\u2019d in granite,
\nI laugh at what you call dissolution,
\nAnd I know the amplitude of time.<\/p>\n

21<\/strong>
\nI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
\nThe pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
\nThe first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.<\/p>\n

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
\nAnd I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
\nAnd I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.<\/p>\n

I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
\nWe have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
\nI show that size is only development.<\/p>\n

Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
\nIt is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.<\/p>\n

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
\nI call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.<\/p>\n

Press close bare-bosom\u2019d night\u2014press close magnetic nourishing night!
\nNight of south winds\u2014night of the large few stars!
\nStill nodding night\u2014mad naked summer night.<\/p>\n

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath\u2019d earth!
\nEarth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
\nEarth of departed sunset\u2014earth of the mountains misty-topt!
\nEarth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
\nEarth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
\nEarth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
\nFar-swooping elbow\u2019d earth\u2014rich apple-blossom\u2019d earth!
\nSmile, for your lover comes.<\/p>\n

Prodigal, you have given me love\u2014therefore I to you give love!
\nO unspeakable passionate love.<\/p>\n

22<\/strong>
\nYou sea! I resign myself to you also\u2014I guess what you mean,
\nI behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
\nI believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
\nWe must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
\nCushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
\nDash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.<\/p>\n

Sea of stretch\u2019d ground-swells,
\nSea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
\nSea of the brine of life and of unshovell\u2019d yet always-ready graves,
\nHowler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
\nI am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.<\/p>\n

Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
\nExtoller of amies and those that sleep in each others\u2019 arms.<\/p>\n

I am he attesting sympathy,
\n(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)<\/p>\n

I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.<\/p>\n

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
\nEvil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
\nMy gait is no fault-finder\u2019s or rejecter\u2019s gait,
\nI moisten the roots of all that has grown.<\/p>\n

Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
\nDid you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work\u2019d over and rectified?<\/p>\n

I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,
\nSoft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
\nThoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.<\/p>\n

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
\nThere is no better than it and now.<\/p>\n

What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,
\nThe wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.<\/p>\n

23<\/strong>
\nEndless unfolding of words of ages!
\nAnd mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.<\/p>\n

A word of the faith that never balks,
\nHere or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.<\/p>\n

It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
\nThat mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.<\/p>\n

I accept Reality and dare not question it,
\nMaterialism first and last imbuing.<\/p>\n

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
\nFetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
\nThis is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,
\nThese mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.
\nThis is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.<\/p>\n

Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
\nYour facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
\nI but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.<\/p>\n

Less the reminders of properties told my words,
\nAnd more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,
\nAnd make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt,
\nAnd beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.<\/p>\n

24<\/strong>
\nWalt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
\nTurbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
\nNo sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
\nNo more modest than immodest.<\/p>\n

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
\nUnscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!<\/p>\n

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
\nAnd whatever is done or said returns at last to me.<\/p>\n

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.<\/p>\n

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
\nBy God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.<\/p>\n

Through me many long dumb voices,
\nVoices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
\nVoices of the diseas\u2019d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
\nVoices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
\nAnd of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
\nAnd of the rights of them the others are down upon,
\nOf the deform\u2019d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
\nFog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.<\/p>\n

Through me forbidden voices,
\nVoices of sexes and lusts, voices veil\u2019d and I remove the veil,
\nVoices indecent by me clarified and transfigur\u2019d.<\/p>\n

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
\nI keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
\nCopulation is no more rank to me than death is.<\/p>\n

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
\nSeeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.<\/p>\n

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch\u2019d from,
\nThe scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
\nThis head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.<\/p>\n

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,
\nTranslucent mould of me it shall be you!
\nShaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
\nFirm masculine colter it shall be you!
\nWhatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
\nYou my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
\nBreast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
\nMy brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
\nRoot of wash\u2019d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
\nMix\u2019d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
\nTrickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
\nSun so generous it shall be you!
\nVapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
\nYou sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
\nWinds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
\nBroad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!
\nHands I have taken, face I have kiss\u2019d, mortal I have ever touch\u2019d, it shall be you.<\/p>\n

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
\nEach moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
\nI cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
\nNor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.<\/p>\n

That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
\nA morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.<\/p>\n

To behold the day-break!
\nThe little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
\nThe air tastes good to my palate.<\/p>\n

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding,
\nScooting obliquely high and low.<\/p>\n

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
\nSeas of bright juice suffuse heaven.<\/p>\n

The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
\nThe heav\u2019d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
\nThe mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!<\/p>\n

25<\/strong>
\nDazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
\nIf I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.<\/p>\n

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
\nWe found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.<\/p>\n

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
\nWith the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.<\/p>\n

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
\nIt provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
\nWalt you contain enough, why don\u2019t you let it out then?<\/p>\n

Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,
\nDo you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
\nWaiting in gloom, protected by frost,
\nThe dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
\nI underlying causes to balance them at last,
\nMy knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
\nHappiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)<\/p>\n

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
\nEncompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
\nI crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.<\/p>\n

Writing and talk do not prove me,
\nI carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
\nWith the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.<\/p>\n

26<\/strong>
\nNow I will do nothing but listen,
\nTo accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.<\/p>\n

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,
\nI hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
\nI hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
\nSounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
\nTalkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,
\nThe angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
\nThe judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,
\nThe heave\u2019e\u2019yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,
\nThe ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color\u2019d lights,
\nThe steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
\nThe slow march play\u2019d at the head of the association marching two and two,
\n(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)<\/p>\n

I hear the violoncello, (\u2019tis the young man\u2019s heart\u2019s complaint,)
\nI hear the key\u2019d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
\nIt shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.<\/p>\n

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
\nAh this indeed is music\u2014this suits me.<\/p>\n

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
\nThe orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.<\/p>\n

I hear the train\u2019d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
\nThe orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
\nIt wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess\u2019d them,
\nIt sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick\u2019d by the indolent waves,
\nI am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
\nSteep\u2019d amid honey\u2019d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,<\/p>\n

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
\nAnd that we call Being.<\/p>\n

27<\/strong>
\nTo be in any form, what is that?
\n(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
\nIf nothing lay more develop\u2019d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.<\/p>\n

Mine is no callous shell,
\nI have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
\nThey seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.<\/p>\n

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
\nTo touch my person to some one else\u2019s is about as much as I can stand.<\/p>\n

28<\/strong>
\nIs this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
\nFlames and ether making a rush for my veins,
\nTreacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
\nMy flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,
\nOn all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
\nStraining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
\nBehaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
\nDepriving me of my best as for a purpose,
\nUnbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
\nDeluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
\nImmodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
\nThey bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,
\nNo consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
\nFetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
\nThen all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.<\/p>\n

The sentries desert every other part of me,
\nThey have left me helpless to a red marauder,
\nThey all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.<\/p>\n

I am given up by traitors,
\nI talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
\nI went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.<\/p>\n

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
\nUnclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.<\/p>\n

29<\/strong>
\nBlind loving wrestling touch, sheath\u2019d hooded sharp-tooth\u2019d touch!
\nDid it make you ache so, leaving me?<\/p>\n

Parting track\u2019d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
\nRich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.<\/p>\n

Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
\nLandscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.<\/p>\n

30<\/strong>
\nAll truths wait in all things,
\nThey neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
\nThey do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
\nThe insignificant is as big to me as any,
\n(What is less or more than a touch?)<\/p>\n

Logic and sermons never convince,
\nThe damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.<\/p>\n

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
\nOnly what nobody denies is so.)<\/p>\n

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
\nI believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
\nAnd a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
\nAnd a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
\nAnd they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,
\nAnd until one and all shall delight us, and we them.<\/p>\n

31<\/strong>
\nI believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
\nAnd the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
\nAnd the tree-toad is a chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre for the highest,
\nAnd the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
\nAnd the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
\nAnd the cow crunching with depress\u2019d head surpasses any statue,
\nAnd a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.<\/p>\n

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
\nAnd am stucco\u2019d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
\nAnd have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
\nBut call any thing back again when I desire it.<\/p>\n

In vain the speeding or shyness,
\nIn vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
\nIn vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder\u2019d bones,
\nIn vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
\nIn vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
\nIn vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
\nIn vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
\nIn vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
\nIn vain the razor-bill\u2019d auk sails far north to Labrador,
\nI follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.<\/p>\n

32<\/strong>
\nI think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain\u2019d,
\nI stand and look at them long and long.<\/p>\n

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
\nThey do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
\nThey do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
\nNot one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
\nNot one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
\nNot one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.<\/p>\n

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
\nThey bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.<\/p>\n

I wonder where they get those tokens,
\nDid I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?<\/p>\n

Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
\nGathering and showing more always and with velocity,
\nInfinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
\nNot too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
\nPicking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.<\/p>\n

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
\nHead high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
\nLimbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
\nEyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.<\/p>\n

His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
\nHis well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.<\/p>\n

I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
\nWhy do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
\nEven as I stand or sit passing faster than you.<\/p>\n

33<\/strong>
\nSpace and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess\u2019d at,
\nWhat I guess\u2019d when I loaf\u2019d on the grass,
\nWhat I guess\u2019d while I lay alone in my bed,
\nAnd again as I walk\u2019d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.<\/p>\n

My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
\nI skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
\nI am afoot with my vision.<\/p>\n

By the city\u2019s quadrangular houses\u2014in log huts, camping with lumbermen,
\nAlong the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,
\nWeeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests,
\nProspecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,
\nScorch\u2019d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river,
\nWhere the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,
\nWhere the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish,
\nWhere the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
\nWhere the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail;
\nOver the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower\u2019d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field,
\nOver the sharp-peak\u2019d farm house, with its scallop\u2019d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,
\nOver the western persimmon, over the long-leav\u2019d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax,
\nOver the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest,
\nOver the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;
\nScaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs,
\nWalking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,
\nWhere the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,
\nWhere the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,
\nWhere the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,
\nWhere cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides,
\nWhere the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;
\nWhere trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,
\nWherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,
\nWhere the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,)
\nWhere the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,
\nWhere the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,
\nWhere the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,
\nWhere the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,
\nWhere the half-burn\u2019d brig is riding on unknown currents,
\nWhere shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;
\nWhere the dense-starr\u2019d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,
\nApproaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,
\nUnder Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,
\nUpon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,
\nUpon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,
\nAt he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter,
\nAt the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw,
\nAt apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,
\nAt musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;
\nWhere the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps,
\nWhere the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter\u2019d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,
\nWhere the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,
\nWhere the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,
\nWhere sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
\nWhere herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near,
\nWhere the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,
\nWhere the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh,
\nWhere bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds,
\nWhere band-neck\u2019d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out,
\nWhere burial coaches enter the arch\u2019d gates of a cemetery,
\nWhere winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,
\nWhere the yellow-crown\u2019d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs,
\nWhere the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,
\nWhere the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well,
\nThrough patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
\nThrough the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,
\nThrough the gymnasium, through the curtain\u2019d saloon, through the office or public hall;
\nPleas\u2019d with the native and pleas\u2019d with the foreign, pleas\u2019d with the new and old,
\nPleas\u2019d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,
\nPleas\u2019d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,
\nPleas\u2019d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash\u2019d church,
\nPleas\u2019d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress\u2019d seriously at the camp-meeting;
\nLooking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,
\nWandering the same afternoon with my face turn\u2019d up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach,
\nMy right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;
\nComing home with the silent and dark-cheek\u2019d bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,)
\nFar from the settlements studying the print of animals\u2019 feet, or the moccasin print,
\nBy the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
\nNigh the coffin\u2019d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;
\nVoyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,
\nHurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,
\nHot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,
\nSolitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,
\nWalking the old hills of Jud\u00e6a with the beautiful gentle God by my side,
\nSpeeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
\nSpeeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,
\nSpeeding with tail\u2019d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,
\nCarrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,
\nStorming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
\nBacking and filling, appearing and disappearing,
\nI tread day and night such roads.<\/p>\n

I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,
\nAnd look at quintillions ripen\u2019d and look at quintillions green.<\/p>\n

I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,
\nMy course runs below the soundings of plummets.<\/p>\n

I help myself to material and immaterial,
\nNo guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.<\/p>\n

I anchor my ship for a little while only,
\nMy messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.<\/p>\n

I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.<\/p>\n

I ascend to the foretruck,
\nI take my place late at night in the crow\u2019s-nest,
\nWe sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,
\nThrough the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,
\nThe enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions,
\nThe white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them,
\nWe are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged,
\nWe pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution,
\nOr we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin\u2019d city,
\nThe blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.<\/p>\n

I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,
\nI turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
\nI tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.<\/p>\n

My voice is the wife\u2019s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
\nThey fetch my man\u2019s body up dripping and drown\u2019d.<\/p>\n

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
\nThe courage of present times and all times,
\nHow the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,
\nHow he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
\nAnd chalk\u2019d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you;
\nHow he follow\u2019d with them and tack\u2019d with them three days and would not give it up,
\nHow he saved the drifting company at last,
\nHow the lank loose-gown\u2019d women look\u2019d when boated from the side of their prepared graves,
\nHow the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp\u2019d unshaved men;
\nAll this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
\nI am the man, I suffer\u2019d, I was there.<\/p>\n

The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
\nThe mother of old, condemn\u2019d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,
\nThe hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover\u2019d with sweat,
\nThe twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,
\nAll these I feel or am.<\/p>\n

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
\nHell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
\nI clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn\u2019d with the ooze of my skin,
\nI fall on the weeds and stones,
\nThe riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
\nTaunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.<\/p>\n

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
\nI do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,
\nMy hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.<\/p>\n

I am the mash\u2019d fireman with breast-bone broken,
\nTumbling walls buried me in their debris,
\nHeat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
\nI heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
\nThey have clear\u2019d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.<\/p>\n

I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,
\nPainless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
\nWhite and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps,
\nThe kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.<\/p>\n

Distant and dead resuscitate,
\nThey show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.<\/p>\n

I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort\u2019s bombardment,
\nI am there again.<\/p>\n

Again the long roll of the drummers,
\nAgain the attacking cannon, mortars,
\nAgain to my listening ears the cannon responsive.<\/p>\n

I take part, I see and hear the whole,
\nThe cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim\u2019d shots,
\nThe ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,
\nWorkmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,
\nThe fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,
\nThe whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.<\/p>\n

Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand,
\nHe gasps through the clot Mind not me\u2014mind\u2014the entrenchments.<\/p>\n

34<\/strong>
\nNow I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,
\n(I tell not the fall of Alamo,
\nNot one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
\nThe hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)
\n\u2019Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.<\/p>\n

Retreating they had form\u2019d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,
\nNine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy\u2019s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance,
\nTheir colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
\nThey treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv\u2019d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march\u2019d back prisoners of war.<\/p>\n

They were the glory of the race of rangers,
\nMatchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
\nLarge, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
\nBearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
\nNot a single one over thirty years of age.<\/p>\n

The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer,
\nThe work commenced about five o\u2019clock and was over by eight.<\/p>\n

None obey\u2019d the command to kneel,
\nSome made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,
\nA few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together,
\nThe maim\u2019d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,
\nSome half-kill\u2019d attempted to crawl away,
\nThese were despatch\u2019d with bayonets or batter\u2019d with the blunts of muskets,
\nA youth not seventeen years old seiz\u2019d his assassin till two more came to release him,
\nThe three were all torn and cover\u2019d with the boy\u2019s blood.<\/p>\n

At eleven o\u2019clock began the burning of the bodies;
\nThat is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.<\/p>\n

35<\/strong>
\nWould you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
\nWould you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
\nList to the yarn, as my grandmother\u2019s father the sailor told it to me.<\/p>\n

Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
\nHis was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;
\nAlong the lower\u2019d eve he came horribly raking us.<\/p>\n

We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch\u2019d,
\nMy captain lash\u2019d fast with his own hands.<\/p>\n

We had receiv\u2019d some eighteen pound shots under the water,
\nOn our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead.<\/p>\n

Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,
\nTen o\u2019clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported,
\nThe master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves.<\/p>\n

The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,
\nThey see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.<\/p>\n

Our frigate takes fire,
\nThe other asks if we demand quarter?
\nIf our colors are struck and the fighting done?<\/p>\n

Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
\nWe have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.<\/p>\n

Only three guns are in use,
\nOne is directed by the captain himself against the enemy\u2019s mainmast,
\nTwo well serv\u2019d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks.<\/p>\n

The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top,
\nThey hold out bravely during the whole of the action.<\/p>\n

Not a moment\u2019s cease,
\nThe leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.<\/p>\n

One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.<\/p>\n

Serene stands the little captain,
\nHe is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
\nHis eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.<\/p>\n

Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.<\/p>\n

36<\/strong>
\nStretch\u2019d and still lies the midnight,
\nTwo great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
\nOur vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer\u2019d,
\nThe captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,
\nNear by the corpse of the child that serv\u2019d in the cabin,
\nThe dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl\u2019d whiskers,
\nThe flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
\nThe husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
\nFormless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,
\nCut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
\nBlack and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
\nA few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
\nDelicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
\nThe hiss of the surgeon\u2019s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
\nWheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,
\nThese so, these irretrievable.<\/p>\n

37<\/strong>
\nYou laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
\nIn at the conquer\u2019d doors they crowd! I am possess\u2019d!
\nEmbody all presences outlaw\u2019d or suffering,
\nSee myself in prison shaped like another man,
\nAnd feel the dull unintermitted pain.<\/p>\n

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
\nIt is I let out in the morning and barr\u2019d at night.<\/p>\n

Not a mutineer walks handcuff\u2019d to jail but I am handcuff\u2019d to him and walk by his side,
\n(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)<\/p>\n

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.<\/p>\n

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
\nMy face is ash-color\u2019d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.<\/p>\n

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
\nI project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.<\/p>\n

38<\/strong>
\nEnough! enough! enough!
\nSomehow I have been stunn\u2019d. Stand back!
\nGive me a little time beyond my cuff\u2019d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,
\nI discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.<\/p>\n

That I could forget the mockers and insults!
\nThat I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!
\nThat I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.<\/p>\n

I remember now,
\nI resume the overstaid fraction,
\nThe grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
\nCorpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.<\/p>\n

I troop forth replenish\u2019d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
\nInland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
\nOur swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
\nThe blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.<\/p>\n

Eleves, I salute you! come forward!
\nContinue your annotations, continue your questionings.<\/p>\n

39<\/strong>
\nThe friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
\nIs he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?<\/p>\n

Is he some Southwesterner rais\u2019d out-doors? is he Kanadian?
\nIs he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?
\nThe mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?<\/p>\n

Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
\nThey desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.<\/p>\n

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb\u2019d head, laughter, and naivet\u00e9,
\nSlow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,
\nThey descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,
\nThey are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes.<\/p>\n

40<\/strong>
\nFlaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask\u2014lie over!
\nYou light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.<\/p>\n

Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,
\nSay, old top-knot, what do you want?<\/p>\n

Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,
\nAnd might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,
\nAnd might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.<\/p>\n

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
\nWhen I give I give myself.<\/p>\n

You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
\nOpen your scarf\u2019d chops till I blow grit within you,
\nSpread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,
\nI am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,
\nAnd any thing I have I bestow.<\/p>\n

I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,
\nYou can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.<\/p>\n

To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,
\nOn his right cheek I put the family kiss,
\nAnd in my soul I swear I never will deny him.<\/p>\n

On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.
\n(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)<\/p>\n

To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.
\nTurn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
\nLet the physician and the priest go home.<\/p>\n

I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
\nO despairer, here is my neck,
\nBy God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.<\/p>\n

I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
\nEvery room of the house do I fill with an arm\u2019d force,
\nLovers of me, bafflers of graves.<\/p>\n

Sleep\u2014I and they keep guard all night,
\nNot doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
\nI have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
\nAnd when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.<\/p>\n

41<\/strong>
\nI am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
\nAnd for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.<\/p>\n

I heard what was said of the universe,
\nHeard it and heard it of several thousand years;
\nIt is middling well as far as it goes\u2014but is that all?<\/p>\n

Magnifying and applying come I,
\nOutbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
\nTaking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
\nLithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,
\nBuying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
\nIn my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,
\nWith Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,
\nTaking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,
\nAdmitting they were alive and did the work of their days,
\n(They bore mites as for unfledg\u2019d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)
\nAccepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,
\nDiscovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,
\nPutting higher claims for him there with his roll\u2019d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel,
\nNot objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
\nLads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,
\nMinding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
\nTheir brawny limbs passing safe over charr\u2019d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
\nBy the mechanic\u2019s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born,
\nThree scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg\u2019d out at their waists,
\nThe snag-tooth\u2019d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,
\nSelling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
\nWhat was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then,
\nThe bull and the bug never worshipp\u2019d half enough,
\nDung and dirt more admirable than was dream\u2019d,
\nThe supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,
\nThe day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;
\nBy my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
\nPutting myself here and now to the ambush\u2019d womb of the shadows.<\/p>\n

42<\/strong>
\nA call in the midst of the crowd,
\nMy own voice, orotund sweeping and final.<\/p>\n

Come my children,
\nCome my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,
\nNow the performer launches his nerve, he has pass\u2019d his prelude on the reeds within.<\/p>\n

Easily written loose-finger\u2019d chords\u2014I feel the thrum of your climax and close.<\/p>\n

My head slues round on my neck,
\nMusic rolls, but not from the organ,
\nFolks are around me, but they are no household of mine.<\/p>\n

Ever the hard unsunk ground,
\nEver the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,
\nEver myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,
\nEver the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn\u2019d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,
\nEver the vexer\u2019s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,
\nEver love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
\nEver the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.<\/p>\n

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
\nTo feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
\nTickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
\nMany sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,
\nA few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.<\/p>\n

This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
\nWhatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,
\nThe mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.<\/p>\n

The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail\u2019d coats,
\nI am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)
\nI acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,
\nWhat I do and say the same waits for them,
\nEvery thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.<\/p>\n

I know perfectly well my own egotism,
\nKnow my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
\nAnd would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.<\/p>\n

Not words of routine this song of mine,
\nBut abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
\nThis printed and bound book\u2014but the printer and the printing-office boy?
\nThe well-taken photographs\u2014but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
\nThe black ship mail\u2019d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets\u2014but the pluck of the captain and engineers?
\nIn the houses the dishes and fare and furniture\u2014but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
\nThe sky up there\u2014yet here or next door, or across the way?
\nThe saints and sages in history\u2014but you yourself?
\nSermons, creeds, theology\u2014but the fathomless human brain,
\nAnd what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?<\/p>\n

43<\/strong>
\nI do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
\nMy faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
\nEnclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,
\nBelieving I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,
\nWaiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,
\nMaking a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis,
\nHelping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
\nDancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,
\nDrinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,
\nWalking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,
\nAccepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine,
\nTo the mass kneeling or the puritan\u2019s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew,
\nRanting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me,
\nLooking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,
\nBelonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.<\/p>\n

One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey.<\/p>\n

Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
\nFrivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten\u2019d, atheistical,
\nI know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.<\/p>\n

How the flukes splash!
\nHow they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!<\/p>\n

Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
\nI take my place among you as much as among any,
\nThe past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
\nAnd what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.<\/p>\n

I do not know what is untried and afterward,
\nBut I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.<\/p>\n

Each who passes is consider\u2019d, each who stops is consider\u2019d, not a single one can it fail.<\/p>\n

It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,
\nNor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
\nNor the little child that peep\u2019d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again,
\nNor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall,
\nNor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,
\nNor the numberless slaughter\u2019d and wreck\u2019d, nor the brutish koboo call\u2019d the ordure of humanity,
\nNor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,
\nNor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,
\nNor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them,
\nNor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.<\/p>\n

44<\/strong>
\nIt is time to explain myself\u2014let us stand up.<\/p>\n

What is known I strip away,
\nI launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.<\/p>\n

The clock indicates the moment\u2014but what does eternity indicate?<\/p>\n

We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
\nThere are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.<\/p>\n

Births have brought us richness and variety,
\nAnd other births will bring us richness and variety.<\/p>\n

I do not call one greater and one smaller,
\nThat which fills its period and place is equal to any.<\/p>\n

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
\nI am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
\nAll has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
\n(What have I to do with lamentation?)<\/p>\n

I am an acme of things accomplish\u2019d, and I an encloser of things to be.<\/p>\n

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
\nOn every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
\nAll below duly travel\u2019d, and still I mount and mount.<\/p>\n

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
\nAfar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
\nI waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
\nAnd took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.<\/p>\n

Long I was hugg\u2019d close\u2014long and long.<\/p>\n

Immense have been the preparations for me,
\nFaithful and friendly the arms that have help\u2019d me.<\/p>\n

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
\nFor room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
\nThey sent influences to look after what was to hold me.<\/p>\n

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
\nMy embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.<\/p>\n

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
\nThe long slow strata piled to rest it on,
\nVast vegetables gave it sustenance,
\nMonstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.<\/p>\n

All forces have been steadily employ\u2019d to complete and delight me,
\nNow on this spot I stand with my robust soul.<\/p>\n

45<\/strong>
\nO span of youth! ever-push\u2019d elasticity!
\nO manhood, balanced, florid and full.<\/p>\n

My lovers suffocate me,
\nCrowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
\nJostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
\nCrying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,
\nCalling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
\nLighting on every moment of my life,
\nBussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
\nNoiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.<\/p>\n

Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!<\/p>\n

Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
\nAnd the dark hush promulges as much as any.<\/p>\n

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
\nAnd all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.<\/p>\n

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
\nOutward and outward and forever outward.<\/p>\n

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
\nHe joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
\nAnd greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.<\/p>\n

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
\nIf I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run,
\nWe should surely bring up again where we now stand,
\nAnd surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.<\/p>\n

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
\nThey are but parts, any thing is but a part.<\/p>\n

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
\nCount ever so much, there is limitless time around that.<\/p>\n

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
\nThe Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
\nThe great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.<\/p>\n

46<\/strong>
\nI know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.<\/p>\n

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
\nMy signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
\nNo friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
\nI have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
\nI lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
\nBut each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
\nMy left hand hooking you round the waist,
\nMy right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.<\/p>\n

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
\nYou must travel it for yourself.<\/p>\n

It is not far, it is within reach,
\nPerhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
\nPerhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.<\/p>\n

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
\nWonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.<\/p>\n

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
\nAnd in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
\nFor after we start we never lie by again.<\/p>\n

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look\u2019d at the crowded heaven,
\nAnd I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill\u2019d and satisfied then?
\nAnd my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.<\/p>\n

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
\nI answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.<\/p>\n

Sit a while dear son,
\nHere are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
\nBut as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.<\/p>\n

Long enough have you dream\u2019d contemptible dreams,
\nNow I wash the gum from your eyes,
\nYou must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.<\/p>\n

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
\nNow I will you to be a bold swimmer,
\nTo jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.<\/p>\n

47<\/strong>
\nI am the teacher of athletes,
\nHe that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
\nHe most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.<\/p>\n

The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,
\nWicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
\nFond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
\nUnrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
\nFirst-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull\u2019s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,
\nPreferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers,
\nAnd those well-tann\u2019d to those that keep out of the sun.<\/p>\n

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
\nI follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
\nMy words itch at your ears till you understand them.<\/p>\n

I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,
\n(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
\nTied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen\u2019d.)<\/p>\n

I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
\nAnd I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.<\/p>\n

If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
\nThe nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,
\nThe maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.<\/p>\n

No shutter\u2019d room or school can commune with me,
\nBut roughs and little children better than they.<\/p>\n

The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,
\nThe woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day,
\nThe farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,
\nIn vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them.<\/p>\n

The soldier camp\u2019d or upon the march is mine,
\nOn the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,
\nOn that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.<\/p>\n

My face rubs to the hunter\u2019s face when he lies down alone in his blanket,
\nThe driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,
\nThe young mother and old mother comprehend me,
\nThe girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,
\nThey and all would resume what I have told them.<\/p>\n

48<\/strong>
\nI have said that the soul is not more than the body,
\nAnd I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
\nAnd nothing, not God, is greater to one than one\u2019s self is,
\nAnd whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
\nAnd I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
\nAnd to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
\nAnd there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
\nAnd there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel\u2019d universe,
\nAnd I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.<\/p>\n

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
\nFor I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
\n(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)<\/p>\n

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
\nNor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.<\/p>\n

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
\nI see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
\nIn the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
\nI find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign\u2019d by God\u2019s name,
\nAnd I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe\u2019er I go,
\nOthers will punctually come for ever and ever.<\/p>\n

49<\/strong>
\nAnd as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.<\/p>\n

To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
\nI see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
\nI recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
\nAnd mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.<\/p>\n

And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
\nI smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
\nI reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish\u2019d breasts of melons.<\/p>\n

And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
\n(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)<\/p>\n

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
\nO suns\u2014O grass of graves\u2014O perpetual transfers and promotions,
\nIf you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?<\/p>\n

Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
\nOf the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,
\nToss, sparkles of day and dusk\u2014toss on the black stems that decay in the muck,
\nToss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.<\/p>\n

I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
\nI perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
\nAnd debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.<\/p>\n

50<\/strong>
\nThere is that in me\u2014I do not know what it is\u2014but I know it is in me.<\/p>\n

Wrench\u2019d and sweaty\u2014calm and cool then my body becomes,
\nI sleep\u2014I sleep long.<\/p>\n

I do not know it\u2014it is without name\u2014it is a word unsaid,
\nIt is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.<\/p>\n

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
\nTo it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
\nIt is not chaos or death\u2014it is form, union, plan\u2014it is eternal life\u2014it is Happiness.<\/p>\n

51<\/strong>
\nThe past and present wilt\u2014I have fill\u2019d them, emptied them,
\nAnd proceed to fill my next fold of the future.<\/p>\n

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
\nLook in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
\n(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)<\/p>\n

Do I contradict myself?
\nVery well then I contradict myself,
\n(I am large, I contain multitudes.)<\/p>\n

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.<\/p>\n

Who has done his day\u2019s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
\nWho wishes to walk with me?<\/p>\n

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?<\/p>\n

52<\/strong>
\nThe spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.<\/p>\n

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
\nI sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.<\/p>\n

The last scud of day holds back for me,
\nIt flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow\u2019d wilds,
\nIt coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.<\/p>\n

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
\nI effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.<\/p>\n

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
\nIf you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.<\/p>\n

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
\nBut I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
\nAnd filter and fibre your blood.<\/p>\n

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
\nMissing me one place search another,
\nI stop somewhere waiting for you.<\/p>\n

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom\u2019d<\/h1>\n

1<\/strong>
\nWhen lilacs last in the dooryard bloom\u2019d,
\nAnd the great star early droop\u2019d in the western sky in the night,
\nI mourn\u2019d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.<\/p>\n

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
\nLilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
\nAnd thought of him I love.<\/p>\n

2<\/strong>
\nO powerful western fallen star!
\nO shades of night\u2014O moody, tearful night!
\nO great star disappear\u2019d\u2014O the black murk that hides the star!
\nO cruel hands that hold me powerless\u2014O helpless soul of me!
\nO harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.<\/p>\n

3<\/strong>
\nIn the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash\u2019d palings,
\nStands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
\nWith many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
\nWith every leaf a miracle\u2014and from this bush in the dooryard,
\nWith delicate-color\u2019d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
\nA sprig with its flower I break.<\/p>\n

4<\/strong>
\nIn the swamp in secluded recesses,
\nA shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.<\/p>\n

Solitary the thrush,
\nThe hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
\nSings by himself a song.<\/p>\n

Song of the bleeding throat,
\nDeath\u2019s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
\nIf thou wast not granted to sing thou would\u2019st surely die.)<\/p>\n

5<\/strong>
\nOver the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
\nAmid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep\u2019d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
\nAmid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
\nPassing the yellow-spear\u2019d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
\nPassing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
\nCarrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
\nNight and day journeys a coffin.<\/p>\n

6<\/strong>
\nCoffin that passes through lanes and streets,
\nThrough day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
\nWith the pomp of the inloop\u2019d flags with the cities draped in black,
\nWith the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil\u2019d women standing,
\nWith processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
\nWith the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
\nWith the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
\nWith dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
\nWith all the mournful voices of the dirges pour\u2019d around the coffin,
\nThe dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs\u2014where amid these you journey,
\nWith the tolling tolling bells\u2019 perpetual clang,
\nHere, coffin that slowly passes,
\nI give you my sprig of lilac.<\/p>\n

7<\/strong>
\n(Nor for you, for one alone,
\nBlossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
\nFor fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.<\/p>\n

All over bouquets of roses,
\nO death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
\nBut mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
\nCopious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
\nWith loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
\nFor you and the coffins all of you O death.)<\/p>\n

8<\/strong>
\nO western orb sailing the heaven,
\nNow I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk\u2019d,
\nAs I walk\u2019d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
\nAs I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
\nAs you droop\u2019d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look\u2019d on,)
\nAs we wander\u2019d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)
\nAs the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
\nAs I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
\nAs I watch\u2019d where you pass\u2019d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
\nAs my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
\nConcluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.<\/p>\n

9<\/strong>
\nSing on there in the swamp,
\nO singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
\nI hear, I come presently, I understand you,
\nBut a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain\u2019d me,
\nThe star my departing comrade holds and detains me.<\/p>\n

10<\/strong>
\nO how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
\nAnd how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
\nAnd what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?<\/p>\n

Sea-winds blown from east and west,
\nBlown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
\nThese and with these and the breath of my chant,
\nI\u2019ll perfume the grave of him I love.<\/p>\n

11<\/strong>
\nO what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
\nAnd what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
\nTo adorn the burial-house of him I love?<\/p>\n

Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
\nWith the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
\nWith floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
\nWith the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,
\nIn the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,
\nWith ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows,
\nAnd the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
\nAnd all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.<\/p>\n

12<\/strong>
\nLo, body and soul\u2014this land,
\nMy own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,
\nThe varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio\u2019s shores and flashing Missouri,
\nAnd ever the far-spreading prairies cover\u2019d with grass and corn.<\/p>\n

Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
\nThe violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
\nThe gentle soft-born measureless light,
\nThe miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill\u2019d noon,
\nThe coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
\nOver my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.<\/p>\n

13<\/strong>
\nSing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
\nSing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
\nLimitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.<\/p>\n

Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
\nLoud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.<\/p>\n

O liquid and free and tender!
\nO wild and loose to my soul\u2014O wondrous singer!
\nYou only I hear\u2014yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
\nYet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.<\/p>\n

14<\/strong>
\nNow while I sat in the day and look\u2019d forth,
\nIn the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
\nIn the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,
\nIn the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb\u2019d winds and the storms,)
\nUnder the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
\nThe many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail\u2019d,
\nAnd the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
\nAnd the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
\nAnd the streets how their throbbings throbb\u2019d, and the cities pent\u2014lo, then and there,
\nFalling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
\nAppear\u2019d the cloud, appear\u2019d the long black trail,
\nAnd I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.<\/p>\n

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
\nAnd the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
\nAnd I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
\nI fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
\nDown to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
\nTo the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.<\/p>\n

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv\u2019d me,
\nThe gray-brown bird I know receiv\u2019d us comrades three,
\nAnd he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.<\/p>\n

From deep secluded recesses,
\nFrom the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
\nCame the carol of the bird.<\/p>\n

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
\nAs I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
\nAnd the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.<\/p>\n

Come lovely and soothing death,
\nUndulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
\nIn the day, in the night, to all, to each,
\nSooner or later delicate death.<\/em><\/p>\n

Prais\u2019d be the fathomless universe,
\nFor life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
\nAnd for love, sweet love\u2014but praise! praise! praise!
\nFor the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.<\/p>\n

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
\nHave none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
\nThen I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
\nI bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.<\/p>\n

Approach strong deliveress,
\nWhen it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
\nLost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
\nLaved in the flood of thy bliss O death.<\/p>\n

From me to thee glad serenades,
\nDances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
\nAnd the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
\nAnd life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.<\/p>\n

The night in silence under many a star,
\nThe ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
\nAnd the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil\u2019d death,
\nAnd the body gratefully nestling close to thee.<\/p>\n

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
\nOver the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
\nOver the dense-pack\u2019d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
\nI float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.<\/p>\n

15<\/strong>
\nTo the tally of my soul,
\nLoud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
\nWith pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.<\/p>\n

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
\nClear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
\nAnd I with my comrades there in the night.<\/p>\n

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
\nAs to long panoramas of visions.<\/p>\n

And I saw askant the armies,
\nI saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
\nBorne through the smoke of the battles and pierc\u2019d with missiles I saw them,
\nAnd carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
\nAnd at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
\nAnd the staffs all splinter\u2019d and broken.<\/p>\n

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
\nAnd the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
\nI saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
\nBut I saw they were not as was thought,
\nThey themselves were fully at rest, they suffer\u2019d not,
\nThe living remain\u2019d and suffer\u2019d, the mother suffer\u2019d,
\nAnd the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer\u2019d,
\nAnd the armies that remain\u2019d suffer\u2019d.<\/p>\n

16<\/strong>
\nPassing the visions, passing the night,
\nPassing, unloosing the hold of my comrades\u2019 hands,
\nPassing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
\nVictorious song, death\u2019s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
\nAs low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
\nSadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
\nCovering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
\nAs that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
\nPassing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
\nI leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.<\/p>\n

I cease from my song for thee,
\nFrom my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
\nO comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.<\/p>\n

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
\nThe song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
\nAnd the tallying chant, the echo arous\u2019d in my soul,
\nWith the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
\nWith the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
\nComrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
\nFor the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands\u2014and this for his dear sake,
\nLilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
\nThere in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.<\/p>\n

Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand<\/h1>\n

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
\nWithout one thing all will be useless,
\nI give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
\nI am not what you supposed, but far different.<\/p>\n

Who is he that would become my follower?
\nWho would sign himself a candidate for my affections?<\/p>\n

The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
\nYou would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
\nYour novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
\nThe whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon\u2019d,
\nTherefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,
\nPut me down and depart on your way.<\/p>\n

Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
\nOr back of a rock in the open air,
\n(For in any roof\u2019d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
\nAnd in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
\nBut just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
\nOr possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
\nHere to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
\nWith the comrade\u2019s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband\u2019s kiss,
\nFor I am the new husband and I am the comrade.<\/p>\n

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
\nWhere I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
\nCarry me when you go forth over land or sea;
\nFor thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
\nAnd thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.<\/p>\n

But these leaves conning you con at peril,
\nFor these leaves and me you will not understand,
\nThey will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you,
\nEven while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
\nAlready you see I have escaped from you.<\/p>\n

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
\nNor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
\nNor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
\nNor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,
\nNor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
\nFor all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
\nTherefore release me and depart on your way.<\/p>\n

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking<\/h1>\n

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
\nOut of the mocking-bird\u2019s throat, the musical shuttle,
\nOut of the Ninth-month midnight,
\nOver the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander\u2019d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
\nDown from the shower\u2019d halo,
\nUp from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,
\nOut from the patches of briers and blackberries,
\nFrom the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
\nFrom your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
\nFrom under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
\nFrom those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
\nFrom the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
\nFrom the myriad thence-arous\u2019d words,
\nFrom the word stronger and more delicious than any,
\nFrom such as now they start the scene revisiting,
\nAs a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
\nBorne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
\nA man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
\nThrowing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
\nI, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
\nTaking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
\nA reminiscence sing.<\/p>\n

Once Paumanok,
\nWhen the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
\nUp this seashore in some briers,
\nTwo feather\u2019d guests from Alabama, two together,
\nAnd their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
\nAnd every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
\nAnd every day the she-bird crouch\u2019d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
\nAnd every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
\nCautiously peering, absorbing, translating.<\/p>\n

Shine! shine! shine!
\nPour down your warmth, great sun!
\nWhile we bask, we two together.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two together!
\nWinds blow south, or winds blow north,
\nDay come white, or night come black,
\nHome, or rivers and mountains from home,
\nSinging all time, minding no time,
\nWhile we two keep together.<\/p>\n

Till of a sudden,
\nMay-be kill\u2019d, unknown to her mate,
\nOne forenoon the she-bird crouch\u2019d not on the nest,
\nNor return\u2019d that afternoon, nor the next,
\nNor ever appear\u2019d again.<\/p>\n

And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
\nAnd at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
\nOver the hoarse surging of the sea,
\nOr flitting from brier to brier by day,
\nI saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
\nThe solitary guest from Alabama.<\/p>\n

Blow! blow! blow!
\nBlow up sea-winds along Paumanok\u2019s shore;
\nI wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, when the stars glisten\u2019d,
\nAll night long on the prong of a moss-scallop\u2019d stake,
\nDown almost amid the slapping waves,
\nSat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.<\/p>\n

He call\u2019d on his mate,
\nHe pour\u2019d forth the meanings which I of all men know.<\/p>\n

Yes my brother I know,
\nThe rest might not, but I have treasur\u2019d every note,
\nFor more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
\nSilent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
\nRecalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,
\nThe white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
\nI, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
\nListen\u2019d long and long.<\/p>\n

Listen\u2019d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
\nFollowing you my brother.<\/p>\n

Soothe! soothe! soothe!<\/em>
\nClose on its wave soothes the wave behind,<\/em>
\nAnd again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,<\/em>
\nBut my love soothes not me, not me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,<\/em>
\nIt is lagging\u2014O I think it is heavy with love, with love.<\/em><\/p>\n

O madly the sea pushes upon the land,<\/em>
\nWith love, with love.<\/em><\/p>\n

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?<\/em>
\nWhat is that little black thing I see there in the white?<\/em><\/p>\n

Loud! loud! loud!<\/em>
\nLoud I call to you, my love!<\/em><\/p>\n

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,<\/em>
\nSurely you must know who is here, is here,<\/em>
\nYou must know who I am, my love.<\/em><\/p>\n

Low-hanging moon!<\/em>
\nWhat is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?<\/em>
\nO it is the shape, the shape of my mate!<\/em>
\nO moon do not keep her from me any longer.<\/em><\/p>\n

Land! land! O land!<\/em>
\nWhichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again if you only would,<\/em>
\nFor I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.<\/em><\/p>\n

O rising stars!<\/em>
\nPerhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.<\/em><\/p>\n

O throat! O trembling throat!<\/em>
\nSound clearer through the atmosphere!<\/em>
\nPierce the woods, the earth,<\/em>
\nSomewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.<\/em><\/p>\n

Shake out carols!<\/em>
\nSolitary here, the night\u2019s carols!<\/em>
\nCarols of lonesome love! death\u2019s carols!<\/em>
\nCarols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!<\/em>
\nO under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!<\/em>
\nO reckless despairing carols.<\/em><\/p>\n

But soft! sink low!<\/em>
\nSoft! let me just murmur,<\/em>
\nAnd do you wait a moment you husky-nois\u2019d sea,<\/em>
\nFor somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,<\/em>
\nSo faint, I must be still, be still to listen,<\/em>
\nBut not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Hither my love!<\/em>
\nHere I am! here!<\/em>
\nWith this just-sustain\u2019d note I announce myself to you,<\/em>
\nThis gentle call is for you my love, for you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Do not be decoy\u2019d elsewhere,<\/em>
\nThat is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,<\/em>
\nThat is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,<\/em>
\nThose are the shadows of leaves.<\/em><\/p>\n

O darkness! O in vain!<\/em>
\nO I am very sick and sorrowful.<\/em><\/p>\n

O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!<\/em>
\nO troubled reflection in the sea!<\/em>
\nO throat! O throbbing heart!<\/em>
\nAnd I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.<\/em><\/p>\n

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!<\/em>
\nIn the air, in the woods, over fields,<\/em>
\nLoved! loved! loved! loved! loved!<\/em>
\nBut my mate no more, no more with me!<\/em>
\nWe two together no more.<\/em><\/p>\n

The aria sinking,
\nAll else continuing, the stars shining,
\nThe winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
\nWith angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
\nOn the sands of Paumanok\u2019s shore gray and rustling,
\nThe yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching,
\nThe boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,
\nThe love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
\nThe aria\u2019s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
\nThe strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
\nThe colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
\nThe undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
\nTo the boy\u2019s soul\u2019s questions sullenly timing, some drown\u2019d secret hissing,
\nTo the outsetting bard.<\/p>\n

Demon or bird! (said the boy\u2019s soul,)
\nIs it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
\nFor I, that was a child, my tongue\u2019s use sleeping, now I have heard you,
\nNow in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
\nAnd already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
\nA thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.<\/p>\n

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
\nO solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
\nNever more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
\nNever more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
\nNever again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,
\nBy the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
\nThe messenger there arous\u2019d, the fire, the sweet hell within,
\nThe unknown want, the destiny of me.<\/p>\n

O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
\nO if I am to have so much, let me have more!<\/p>\n

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
\nThe word final, superior to all,
\nSubtle, sent up\u2014what is it?\u2014I listen;
\nAre you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
\nIs that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?<\/p>\n

Whereto answering, the sea,
\nDelaying not, hurrying not,
\nWhisper\u2019d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,<\/p>\n

Lisp\u2019d to me the low and delicious word death,
\nAnd again death, death, death, death,
\nHissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous\u2019d child\u2019s heart,
\nBut edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
\nCreeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
\nDeath, death, death, death, death.<\/p>\n

Which I do not forget,
\nBut fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
\nThat he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok\u2019s gray beach,
\nWith the thousand responsive songs at random,
\nMy own songs awaked from that hour,
\nAnd with them the key, the word up from the waves,
\nThe word of the sweetest song and all songs,
\nThat strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
\n(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)
\nThe sea whisper\u2019d me.<\/p>\n

\n

Sources<\/h2>\n

“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom\u2019d\u201d by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand\u201d by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking\u201d by Walt Whitman is in the public domain. This version was retrieved from Poetry Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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