1
I CELEBRATE myself; | |
And what I assume you shall assume; | |
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you. | |
|
I loafe and invite my Soul; | |
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. | 5 |
|
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes; | |
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it; | |
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. | |
|
The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless; | |
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it; | 10 |
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked; | |
I am mad for it to be in contact with me. | |
|
2
The smoke of my own breath; | |
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine; | |
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs; | 15 |
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn; | |
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind; | |
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms; | |
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag; | |
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides; | 20 |
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. | |
|
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? | |
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? | |
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? | |
|
Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems; | 25 |
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;) | |
You 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; | |
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me: | |
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. | |
|
3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end; | 30 |
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. | |
|
There was never any more inception than there is now, | |
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; | |
And will never be any more perfection than there is now, | |
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. | 35 |
|
Urge, and urge, and urge; | |
Always the procreant urge of the world. | |
|
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always substance and increase, always sex; | |
Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always a breed of life. | |
|
To elaborate is no avail—learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. | 40 |
|
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, | |
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, | |
I and this mystery, here we stand. | |
|
Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my Soul. | |
|
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, | 45 |
Till that becomes unseen, and receives proof in its turn. | |
|
Showing the best, and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age; | |
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. | |
|
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean; | |
Not an inch, nor a particle of an inch, is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. | 50 |
|
I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing: | |
As the hugging and loving Bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day, with stealthy tread, | |
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels, swelling the house with their plenty, | |
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization, and scream at my eyes, | |
That they turn from gazing after and down the road, | 55 |
And forthwith cipher and show me a cent, | |
Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead? | |
|
4
Trippers and askers surround me; | |
People I meet—the effect upon me of my early life, or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, | |
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, | 60 |
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, | |
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, | |
The sickness of one of my folks, or of myself, or ill-doing, or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations; | |
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; | |
These come to me days and nights, and go from me again, | 65 |
But they are not the Me myself. | |
|
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am; | |
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary; | |
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, | |
Looking with side-curved head, curious what will come next; | 70 |
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it. | |
|
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders; | |
I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait. | |
|
5
I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you; | |
And you must not be abased to the other. | 75 |
|
Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; | |
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; | |
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. | |
|
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning; | |
How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn’d over upon me, | 80 |
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, | |
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. | |
|
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth; | |
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, | |
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own; | 85 |
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers; | |
And that a kelson of the creation is love; | |
And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields; | |
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them; | |
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heap’d stones, elder, mullen and poke-weed. | 90 |
|
6
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; | |
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he. | |
|
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. | |
|
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, | |
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt, | 95 |
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, Whose? | |
|
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. | |
|
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic; | |
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, | |
Growing among black folks as among white; | 100 |
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. | |
|
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. | |
|
Tenderly will I use you, curling grass; | |
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men; | |
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; | 105 |
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps; | |
And here you are the mothers’ laps. | |
|
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers; | |
Darker than the colorless beards of old men; | |
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. | 110 |
|
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! | |
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. | |
|
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, | |
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. | |
|
What do you think has become of the young and old men? | 115 |
And what do you think has become of the women and children? | |
|
They are alive and well somewhere; | |
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; | |
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, | |
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. | 120 |
|
All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; | |
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. | |
|
7
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? | |
I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. | |
|
I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots; | 125 |
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good; | |
The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. | |
|
I am not an earth, nor an adjunct of an earth; | |
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself; | |
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.) | 130 |
|
Every kind for itself and its own—for me mine, male and female; | |
For me those that have been boys, and that love women; | |
For me the man that is proud, and feels how it stings to be slighted; | |
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid—for me mothers, and the mothers of mothers; | |
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears; | 135 |
For me children, and the begetters of children. | |
|
Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded; | |
I see through the broadcloth and gingham, whether or no; | |
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away. | |
|
8
The little one sleeps in its cradle; | 140 |
I lift the gauze, and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. | |
|
The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill; | |
I peeringly view them from the top. | |
|
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bed-room; | |
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair—I note where the pistol has fallen. | 145 |
|
The blab of the pave, the tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders; | |
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor; | |
The snow-sleighs, the clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs; | |
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs; | |
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside, borne to the hospital; | 150 |
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall; | |
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star, quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd; | |
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes; | |
What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sun-struck, or in fits; | |
What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes; | 155 |
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here—what howls restrain’d by decorum; | |
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips; | |
I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come, and I depart. | |
|
9
The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready; | |
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon; | 160 |
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged; | |
The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow. | |
|
I am there—I help—I came stretch’d atop of the load; | |
I felt its soft jolts—one leg reclined on the other; | |
I jump from the cross-beams, and seize the clover and timothy, | 165 |
And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair full of wisps. | |
|
10
Alone, far in the wilds and mountains, I hunt, | |
Wandering, amazed at my own lightness and glee; | |
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night, | |
Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game; | 170 |
Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves, with my dog and gun by my side. | |
|
The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails—she cuts the sparkle and scud; | |
My eyes settle the land—I bend at her prow, or shout joyously from the deck. | |
|
The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me; | |
I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots, and went and had a good time: | 175 |
(You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.) | |
|
I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west—the bride was a red girl; | |
Her 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; | |
On 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; | |
She had long eyelashes—her head was bare—her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet. | 180 |
|
The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside; | |
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile; | |
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, | |
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, | |
And brought water, and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, | 185 |
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, | |
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, | |
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; | |
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north; | |
(I had him sit next me at table—my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.) | 190 |
|
11
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore; | |
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly: | |
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome. | |
|
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank; | |
She hides, handsome and richly drest, aft the blinds of the window. | 195 |
|
Which of the young men does she like the best? | |
Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. | |
|
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you; | |
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. | |
|
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather; | 200 |
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. | |
|
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair: | |
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies. | |
|
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies; | |
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. | 205 |
|
The young men float on their backs—their white bellies bulge to the sun—they do not ask who seizes fast to them; | |
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch; | |
They do not think whom they souse with spray. | |
|
12
The butcher-boy puts off his killing clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market; | |
I loiter, enjoying his repartee, and his shuffle and break-down. | 210 |
|
Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil; | |
Each has his main-sledge—they are all out—(there is a great heat in the fire.) | |
|
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements; | |
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms; | |
Over-hand the hammers swing—over-hand so slow—over-hand so sure: | 215 |
They do not hasten—each man hits in his place. | |
|
13
The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses—the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain; | |
The negro that drives the dray of the stone-yard—steady and tall he stands, pois’d on one leg on the string-piece; | |
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens over his hip-band; | |
His glance is calm and commanding—he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead; | 220 |
The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache—falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs. | |
|
I behold the picturesque giant, and love him—and I do not stop there; | |
I go with the team also. | |
|
In me the caresser of life wherever moving—backward as well as forward slueing; | |
To niches aside and junior bending. | 225 |
|
Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade! what is that you express in your eyes? | |
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. | |
|
My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck, on my distant and day-long ramble; | |
They rise together—they slowly circle around. | |
|
I believe in those wing’d purposes, | 230 |
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me, | |
And consider green and violet, and the tufted crown, intentional; | |
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else; | |
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me; | |
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me. | 235 |
|
14
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night; | |
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation; | |
(The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close; | |
I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.) | |
|
The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog, | 240 |
The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, | |
The brood of the turkey-hen, and she with her half-spread wings; | |
I see in them and myself the same old law. | |
|
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections; | |
They scorn the best I can do to relate them. | 245 |
|
I am enamour’d of growing out-doors, | |
Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods, | |
Of the builders and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses; | |
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. | |
|
What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me; | 250 |
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns; | |
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me; | |
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will; | |
Scattering it freely forever. | |
|
15
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft; | 255 |
The carpenter dresses his plank—the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp; | |
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner; | |
The pilot seizes the king-pin—he heaves down with a strong arm; | |
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat—lance and harpoon are ready; | |
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches; | 260 |
The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar; | |
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel; | |
The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First-day loafe, and looks at the oats and rye; | |
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirm’d case, | |
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;) | 265 |
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, | |
He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; | |
The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table, | |
What is removed drops horribly in a pail; | |
The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand—the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove; | 270 |
The machinist rolls up his sleeves—the policeman travels his beat—the gate-keeper marks who pass; | |
The young fellow drives the express-wagon—(I love him, though I do not know him;) | |
The half-breed straps on his light boots to complete in the race; | |
The western turkey-shooting draws old and young—some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, | |
Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; | 275 |
The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee; | |
As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle; | |
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other; | |
The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret, and harks to the musical rain; | |
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron; | 280 |
The squaw, wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth, is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale; | |
The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways; | |
As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat, the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers; | |
The young sister holds out the skein, while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots; | |
The one-year wife is recovering and happy, having a week ago borne her first child; | 285 |
The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine, or in the factory or mill; | |
The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing; | |
The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer—the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book—the sign-painter is lettering with red and gold; | |
The canal boy trots on the tow-path—the book-keeper counts at his desk—the shoemaker waxes his thread; | |
The conductor beats time for the band, and all the performers follow him; | 290 |
The child is baptized—the convert is making his first professions; | |
The regatta is spread on the bay—the race is begun—how the white sails sparkle! | |
The drover, watching his drove, sings out to them that would stray; | |
The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;) | |
The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype; | 295 |
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly; | |
The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips; | |
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck; | |
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other; | |
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths, nor jeer you;) | 300 |
The President, holding a cabinet council, is surrounded by the Great Secretaries; | |
On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms; | |
The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold; | |
The Missourian crosses the plains, toting his wares and his cattle; | |
As the fare-collector goes through the train, he gives notice by the jingling of loose change; | 305 |
The floor-men are laying the floor—the tinners are tinning the roof—the masons are calling for mortar; | |
In single file, each shouldering his hod, pass onward the laborers; | |
Seasons pursuing each other, the indescribable crowd is gather’d—it is the Fourth of Seventh-month—(What salutes of cannon and small arms!) | |
Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground; | |
Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface; | 310 |
The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe; | |
Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cottonwood or pekan-trees; | |
Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river, or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansaw; | |
Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahoochee or Altamahaw; | |
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them; | 315 |
In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport; | |
The city sleeps, and the country sleeps; | |
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time; | |
The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; | |
And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them; | 320 |
And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am. | |
|
16
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise; | |
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, | |
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, | |
Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine; | 325 |
One of the Great Nation, the nation of many nations, the smallest the same, and the largest the same; | |
A southerner soon as a northerner—a planter nonchalant and hospitable, down by the Oconee I live; | |
A Yankee, bound by my own way, ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth, and the sternest joints on earth; | |
A Kentuckian, walking the vale of the Elkhorn, in my deer-skin leggings—a Louisianian or Georgian; | |
A boatman over lakes or bays, or along coasts—a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; | 330 |
At home on Kanadian snow-shoes, or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland; | |
At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking; | |
At home on the hills of Vermont, or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch; | |
Comrade of Californians—comrade of free north-westerners, (loving their big proportions;) | |
Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen—comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat; | 335 |
A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest; | |
A novice beginning, yet experient of myriads of seasons; | |
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion; | |
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker; | |
A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. | 340 |
|
I resist anything better than my own diversity; | |
I breathe the air, but leave plenty after me, | |
And am not stuck up, and am in my place. | |
|
(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place; | |
The suns I see, and the suns I cannot see, are in their place; | 345 |
The palpable is in its place, and the impalpable is in its place.) | |
|
17
These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands—they are not original with me; | |
If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing; | |
If they are not the riddle, and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing; | |
If they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing. | 350 |
|
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is; | |
This is the common air that bathes the globe. | |
|
18
With music strong I come—with my cornets and my drums, | |
I play not marches for accepted victors only—I play great marches for conquer’d and slain persons. | |
|
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? | 355 |
I also say it is good to fall—battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. | |
|
I beat and pound for the dead; | |
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. | |
|
Vivas to those who have fail’d! | |
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! | 360 |
And to those themselves who sank in the sea! | |
And to all generals that lost engagements! and all overcome heroes! | |
And the numberless unknown heroes, equal to the greatest heroes known. | |
|
19
This is the meal equally set—this is the meat for natural hunger; | |
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous—I make appointments with all; | 365 |
I will not have a single person slighted or left away; | |
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited; | |
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited—the venerealee is invited: | |
There shall be no difference between them and the rest. | |
|
This is the press of a bashful hand—this is the float and odor of hair; | 370 |
This is the touch of my lips to yours—this is the murmur of yearning; | |
This is the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face; | |
This is the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again. | |
|
Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? | |
Well, I have—for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has. | 375 |
|
Do you take it I would astonish? | |
Does the daylight astonish? Does the early redstart, twittering through the woods? | |
Do I astonish more than they? | |
|
This hour I tell things in confidence; | |
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. | 380 |
|
20
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; | |
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? | |
|
What is a man, anyhow? What am I? What are you? | |
|
All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own; | |
Else it were time lost listening to me. | 385 |
|
I do not snivel that snivel the world over, | |
That months are vacuums, and the ground but wallow and filth; | |
That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape, and tears. | |
|
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids—conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d; | |
I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out. | 390 |
|
Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious? | |
|
Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsell’d with doctors, and calculated close, | |
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. | |
|
In all people I see myself—none more, and not one a barleycorn less; | |
And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them. | 395 |
|
And I know I am solid and sound; | |
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow; | |
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. | |
|
I know I am deathless; | |
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass; | 400 |
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night. | |
|
I know I am august; | |
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood; | |
I see that the elementary laws never apologize; | |
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.) | 405 |
|
I exist as I am—that is enough; | |
If no other in the world be aware, I sit content; | |
And if each and all be aware, I sit content. | |
|
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself; | |
And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years, | 410 |
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. | |
|
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite; | |
I laugh at what you call dissolution; | |
And I know the amplitude of time. | |
|
21
I am the poet of the Body; | 415 |
And I am the poet of the Soul. | |
|
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me; | |
The first I graft and increase upon myself—the latter I translate into a new tongue. | |
|
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man; | |
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man; | 420 |
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. | |
|
I chant the chant of dilation or pride; | |
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough; | |
I show that size is only development. | |
|
Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President? | 425 |
It is a trifle—they will more than arrive there, every one, and still pass on. | |
|
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night; | |
I call to the earth and sea, half-held by the night. | |
|
Press close, bare-bosom’d night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing night! | |
Night of south winds! night of the large few stars! | 430 |
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night. | |
|
Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath’d earth! | |
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees; | |
Earth of departed sunset! earth of the mountains, misty-topt! | |
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue! | 435 |
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! | |
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake! | |
Far-swooping elbow’d earth! rich, apple-blossom’d earth! | |
Smile, for your lover comes! | |
|
Prodigal, you have given me love! Therefore I to you give love! | 440 |
O unspeakable, passionate love! | |
|
22
You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean; | |
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers; | |
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me; | |
We must have a turn together—I undress—hurry me out of sight of the land; | 445 |
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse; | |
Dash me with amorous wet—I can repay you. | |
|
Sea of stretch’d ground-swells! | |
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! | |
Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves! | 450 |
Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea! | |
I am integral with you—I too am of one phase, and of all phases. | |
|
Partaker of influx and efflux I—extoller of hate and conciliation; | |
Extoller of amies, and those that sleep in each others’ arms. | |
|
I am he attesting sympathy; | 455 |
(Shall I make my list of things in the house, and skip the house that supports them?) | |
|
I am not the poet of goodness only—I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. | |
|
Washes and razors for foofoos—for me freckles and a bristling beard. | |
|
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? | |
Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me—I stand indifferent; | 460 |
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait; | |
I moisten the roots of all that has grown. | |
|
Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy? | |
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified? | |
|
I find one side a balance, and the antipodal side a balance; | 465 |
Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine; | |
Thoughts and deeds of the present, our rouse and early start. | |
|
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions, | |
There is no better than it and now. | |
|
What behaved well in the past, or behaves well to-day, is not such a wonder; | 470 |
The wonder is, always and always, how there can be a mean man or an infidel. | |
|
23
Endless unfolding of words of ages! | |
And mine a word of the modern—the word En-Masse. | |
|
A word of the faith that never balks; | |
Here or henceforward, it is all the same to me—I accept Time, absolutely. | 475 |
|
It alone is without flaw—it rounds and completes all; | |
That mystic, baffling wonder I love, alone completes all. | |
|
I accept reality, and dare not question it; | |
Materialism first and last imbuing. | |
|
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration! | 480 |
Fetch stonecrop, mixt with cedar and branches of lilac; | |
This is the lexicographer—this the chemist—this made a grammar of the old cartouches; | |
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas; | |
This is the geologist—this works with the scalpel—and this is a mathematician. | |
|
Gentlemen! to you the first honors always: | 485 |
Your facts are useful and real—and yet they are not my dwelling; | |
(I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.) | |
|
Less the reminders of properties told, my words; | |
And more the reminders, they, of life untold, and of freedom and extrication, | |
And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt, | 490 |
And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives, and them that plot and conspire. | |
|
24
Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son, | |
Turbulent, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding; | |
No sentimentalist—no stander above men and women, or apart from them; | |
No more modest than immodest. | 495 |
|
Unscrew the locks from the doors! | |
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! | |
|
Whoever degrades another degrades me; | |
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. | |
|
Through me the afflatus surging and surging—through me the current and index. | 500 |
|
I speak the pass-word primeval—I give the sign of democracy; | |
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. | |
|
Through me many long dumb voices; | |
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves; | |
Voices of prostitutes, and of deform’d persons; | 505 |
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs; | |
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, | |
And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the father-stuff, | |
And of the rights of them the others are down upon; | |
Of the trivial, flat, foolish, despised, | 510 |
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. | |
|
Through me forbidden voices; | |
Voice of sexes and lusts—voices veil’d, and I remove the veil; | |
Voices indecent, by me clarified and transfigur’d. | |
|
I do not press my fingers across my mouth; | 515 |
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart; | |
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. | |
|
I believe in the flesh and the appetites; | |
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. | |
|
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from; | 520 |
The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer; | |
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. | |
|
If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it. | |
|
Translucent mould of me, it shall be you! | |
Shaded ledges and rests, it shall be you! | 525 |
Firm masculine colter, it shall be you. | |
|
Whatever goes to the tilth of me, it shall be you! | |
You my rich blood! Your milky stream, pale strippings of my life. | |
|
Breast that presses against other breasts, it shall be you! | |
My brain, it shall be your occult convolutions. | 530 |
|
Root of wash’d sweet flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! | |
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! | |
Trickling sap of maple! fibre of manly wheat! it shall be you! | |
|
Sun so generous, it shall be you! | |
Vapors lighting and shading my face, it shall be you! | 535 |
You sweaty brooks and dews, it shall be you! | |
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me, it shall be you! | |
Broad, muscular fields! branches of live oak! loving lounger in my winding paths! it shall be you! | |
Hands I have taken—face I have kiss’d—mortal I have ever touch’d! it shall be you. | |
|
I dote on myself—there is that lot of me, and all so luscious; | 540 |
Each moment, and whatever happens, thrills me with joy. | |
|
O I am wonderful! | |
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish; | |
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again. | |
|
That I walk up my stoop! I pause to consider if it really be; | 545 |
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. | |
|
To behold the day-break! | |
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows; | |
The air tastes good to my palate. | |
|
Hefts of the moving world, at innocent gambols, silently rising, freshly exuding, | 550 |
Scooting obliquely high and low. | |
|
Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs; | |
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven. | |
|
The earth by the sky staid with—the daily close of their junction; | |
The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head; | 555 |
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master! | |
|
25
Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the sun-rise would kill me, | |
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me. | |
|
We also ascend, dazzling and tremendous as the sun; | |
We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak. | 560 |
|
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach; | |
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds, and volumes of worlds. | |
|
Speech is the twin of my vision—it is unequal to measure itself; | |
It provokes me forever; | |
It says sarcastically, Walt, you contain enough—why don’t you let it out, then? | 565 |
|
Come now, I will not be tantalized—you conceive too much of articulation. | |
|
Do you not know, O speech, how the buds beneath you are folded? | |
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost; | |
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams; | |
I underlying causes, to balance them at last; | 570 |
My knowledge my live parts—it keeping tally with the meaning of things, | |
HAPPINESS—which, whoever hears me, let him or her set out in search of this day. | |
|
My final merit I refuse you—I refuse putting from me what I really am; | |
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me; | |
I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. | 575 |
|
Writing and talk do not prove me; | |
I carry the plenum of proof, and everything else, in my face; | |
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic. | |
|
26
I think I will do nothing now but listen, | |
To accrue what I hear into myself—to let sounds contribute toward me. | 580 |
|
I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals; | |
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice; | |
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following; | |
|
Sounds of the city, and sounds out of the city—sounds of the day and night; | |
Talkative young ones to those that like them—the loud laugh of work-people at their meals; | 585 |
The angry base of disjointed friendship—the faint tones of the sick; | |
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence; | |
The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves—the refrain of the anchor-lifters; | |
The ring of alarm-bells—the cry of fire—the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts, with premonitory tinkles, and color’d lights; | |
The steam-whistle—the solid roll of the train of approaching cars; | 590 |
The slow-march play’d at the head of the association, marching two and two, | |
(They go to guard some corpse—the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) | |
|
I hear the violoncello (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint;) | |
I hear the key’d cornet—it glides quickly in through my ears; | |
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. | 595 |
|
I hear the chorus—it is a grand opera; | |
Ah, this indeed is music! This suits me. | |
|
A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me; | |
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full. | |
|
I hear the train’d soprano—(what work, with hers, is this?) | 600 |
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies; | |
It wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possess’d them; | |
It sails me—I dab with bare feet—they are lick’d by the indolent waves; | |
I am exposed, cut by bitter and angry hail—I lose my breath, | |
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death; | 605 |
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, | |
And that we call BEING. | |
|
27
To be, in any form—what is that? | |
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither;) | |
If nothing lay more develop’d, the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. | 610 |
|
Mine is no callous shell; | |
I have instant conductors all over me, whether I pass or stop; | |
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. | |
|
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy; | |
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand. | 615 |
|
28
Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity, | |
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, | |
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, | |
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself; | |
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs, | 620 |
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, | |
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, | |
Depriving me of my best, as for a purpose, | |
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, | |
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields, | 625 |
Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, | |
They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me; | |
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger; | |
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while, | |
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me. | 630 |
|
The sentries desert every other part of me; | |
They have left me helpless to a red marauder; | |
They all come to the headland, to witness and assist against me. | |
|
I am given up by traitors; | |
I talk wildly—I have lost my wits—I and nobody else am the greatest traitor; | 635 |
I went myself first to the headland—my own hands carried me there. | |
|
You villian touch! what are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat; | |
Unclench your floodgates! you are too much for me. | |
|
29
Blind, loving, wrestling touch! sheath’d, hooded, sharp-tooth’d touch! | |
Did it make you ache so, leaving me? | 640 |
|
Parting, track’d by arriving—perpetual payment of perpetual loan; | |
Rich, showering rain, and recompense richer afterward. | |
|
Sprouts take and accumulate—stand by the curb prolific and vital: | |
Landscapes, projected, masculine, full-sized and golden. | |
|
30
All truths wait in all things; | 645 |
They neither hasten their own delivery, nor resist it; | |
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon; | |
The insignificant is as big to me as any; | |
(What is less or more than a touch?) | |
|
Logic and sermons never convince; | 650 |
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. | |
|
Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so; | |
Only what nobody denies is so. | |
|
A minute and a drop of me settle my brain; | |
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps, | 655 |
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman, | |
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other, | |
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific, | |
And until every one shall delight us, and we them. | |
|
31
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, | 660 |
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, | |
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest, | |
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, | |
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, | |
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue, | 665 |
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels, | |
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking shortcake. | |
|
I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, | |
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over, | |
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, | 670 |
And call anything close again, when I desire it. | |
|
In vain the speeding or shyness; | |
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach; | |
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones; | |
In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes; | 675 |
In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters lying low; | |
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky; | |
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs; | |
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods; | |
In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador; | 680 |
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. | |
|
32
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d; | |
I stand and look at them long and long. | |
|
They do not sweat and whine about their condition; | |
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; | 685 |
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God; | |
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things; | |
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago; | |
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth. | |
|
So they show their relations to me, and I accept them; | 690 |
They bring me tokens of myself—they evince them plainly in their possession. | |
|
I wonder where they get those tokens: | |
Did I pass that way huge times ago, and negligently drop them? | |
Myself moving forward then and now and forever, | |
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity, | 695 |
Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them; | |
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers; | |
Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms. | |
|
A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, | |
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears, | 700 |
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, | |
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness—ears finely cut, flexibly moving. | |
|
His nostrils dilate, as my heels embrace him; | |
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure, as we race around and return. | |
|
I but use you a moment, then I resign you, stallion; | 705 |
Why do I need your paces, when I myself out-gallop them? | |
Even, as I stand or sit, passing faster than you. | |
|
33
O swift wind! O space and time! now I see it is true, what I guessed at; | |
What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass; | |
What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed, | 710 |
And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning. | |
|
My ties and ballasts leave me—I travel—I sail—my elbows rest in the sea-gaps; | |
I skirt the sierras—my palms cover continents; | |
I am afoot with my vision. | |
|
By the city’s quadrangular houses—in log huts—camping with lumbermen; | 715 |
Along the ruts of the turnpike—along the dry gulch and rivulet bed; | |
Weeding my onion-patch, or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips—crossing savannas—trailing in forests; | |
Prospecting—gold-digging—girdling the trees of a new purchase; | |
Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand—hauling my boat down the shallow river; | |
Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead—where the buck turns furiously at the hunter; | 720 |
Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock—where the otter is feeding on fish; | |
Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou; | |
Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey—where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail; | |
Over the growing sugar—over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant—over the rice in its low moist field; | |
Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters; | 725 |
Over the western persimmon—over the long-leav’d corn—over the delicate blue-flower flax; | |
Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest; | |
Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze; | |
Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs; | |
Walking the path worn in the grass, and beat through the leaves of the brush; | 730 |
Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot; | |
Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve—where the great gold-bug drops through the dark; | |
Where flails keep time on the barn floor; | |
Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow; | |
Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides; | 735 |
Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen—where andirons straddle the hearth-slab—where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters; | |
Where trip-hammers crash—where the press is whirling its cylinders; | |
Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs; | |
Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself, and looking composedly down;) | |
Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose—where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand; | 740 |
Where the she-whale swims with her calf, and never forsakes it; | |
Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke; | |
Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water; | |
Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents, | |
Where shells grow to her slimy deck—where the dead are corrupting below; | 745 |
Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments; | |
Approaching Manhattan, up by the long-stretching island; | |
Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance; | |
Upon a door-step—upon the horse-block of hard wood outside; | |
Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs, or a good game of base-ball; | 750 |
At he-festivals, with blackguard jibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter; | |
At the cider-mill, tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw; | |
At apple-peelings, wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find; | |
At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings: | |
Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps; | 755 |
Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard—where the dry-stalks are scattered—where the brood-cow waits in the hovel; | |
Where the bull advances to do his masculine work—where the stud to the mare—where the cock is treading the hen; | |
Where the heifers browse—where geese nip their food with short jerks; | |
Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; | |
Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; | 760 |
Where the humming-bird shimmers—where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding; | |
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh; | |
Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden, half hid by the high weeds; | |
Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out; | |
Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery; | 765 |
Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees; | |
Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs; | |
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon; | |
Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well; | |
Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves; | 770 |
Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs; | |
Through the gymnasium—through the curtain’d saloon—through the office or public hall; | |
Pleas’d with the native, and pleas’d with the foreign—pleas’d with the new and old; | |
Pleas’d with women, the homely as well as the handsome; | |
Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously; | 775 |
Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the white-wash’d church; | |
Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, or any preacher—impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting: | |
Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon—flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate-glass; | |
Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds, | |
My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle: | 780 |
Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy—(behind me he rides at the drape of the day;) | |
Far from the settlements, studying the print of animals’ feet, or the moccasin print; | |
By the cot in the hospital, reaching lemonade to a feverish patient; | |
Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle: | |
Voyaging to every port, to dicker and adventure; | 785 |
Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any; | |
Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him; | |
Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while; | |
Walking the old hills of Judea, with the beautiful gentle God by my side; | |
Speeding through space—speeding through heaven and the stars; | 790 |
Speeding amid the seven satellites, and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles; | |
Speeding with tail’d meteors—throwing fire-balls like the rest; | |
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly; | |
Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, | |
Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing; | 795 |
I tread day and night such roads. | |
|
I visit the orchards of spheres, and look at the product: | |
And look at quintillions ripen’d, and look at quintillions green. | |
|
I fly the flight of the fluid and swallowing soul; | |
My course runs below the soundings of plummets. | 800 |
|
I help myself to material and immaterial; | |
No guard can shut me off, nor law prevent me. | |
|
I anchor my ship for a little while only; | |
My messengers continually cruise away, or bring their returns to me. | |
|
I go hunting polar furs and the seal—leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff—clinging to topples of brittle and blue. | 805 |
|
I ascend to the foretruck; | |
I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest; | |
We sail the arctic sea—it is plenty light enough; | |
Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty; | |
The enormous masses of ice pass me, and I pass them—the scenery is plain in all directions; | 810 |
The white-topt mountains show in the distance—I fling out my fancies toward them; | |
(We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged; | |
We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment—we pass with still feet and caution; | |
Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city; | |
The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.) | 815 |
|
I am a free companion—I bivouac by invading watchfires. | |
|
I turn the bridegroom out of bed, and stay with the bride myself; | |
I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips. | |
|
My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs; | |
They fetch my man’s body up, dripping and drown’d. | 820 |
|
I understand the large hearts of heroes, | |
The courage of present times and all times; | |
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm; | |
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights, | |
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you: | 825 |
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them—and would not give it up; | |
How he saved the drifting company at last: | |
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves; | |
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men: | |
All this I swallow—it tastes good—I like it well—it becomes mine; | 830 |
I am the man—I suffer’d—I was there. | |
|
The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs; | |
The mother, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on; | |
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat; | |
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck—the murderous buckshot and the bullets; | 835 |
All these I feel, or am. | |
|
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, | |
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen; | |
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin; | |
I fall on the weeds and stones; | 840 |
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close, | |
Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks. | |
|
Agonies are one of my changes of garments; | |
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels—I myself become the wounded person; | |
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. | 845 |
|
I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken; | |
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris; | |
Heat and smoke I inspired—I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades; | |
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels; | |
They have clear’d the beams away—they tenderly lift me forth. | 850 |
|
I lie in the night air in my red shirt—the pervading hush is for my sake; | |
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy; | |
White and beautiful are the faces around me—the heads are bared of their fire-caps; | |
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. | |
|
Distant and dead resuscitate; | 855 |
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me—I am the clock myself. | |
|
I am an old artillerist—I tell of my fort’s bombardment; | |
I am there again. | |
|
Again the long roll of the drummers; | |
Again the attacking cannon, mortars; | 860 |
Again, to my listening ears, the cannon responsive. | |
|
I take part—I see and hear the whole; | |
The cries, curses, roar—the plaudits for well-aim’d shots; | |
The ambulanza slowly passing, trailing its red drip; | |
Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs; | 865 |
The fall of grenades through the rent roof—the fan-shaped explosion; | |
The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air. | |
|
Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general—he furiously waves with his hand; | |
He gasps through the clot, Mind not me—mind—the entrenchments. | |
|
34
Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth; | 870 |
(I tell not the fall of Alamo, | |
Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, | |
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo;) | |
’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. | |
|
Retreating, they had form’d in a hollow square, with their baggage for breastworks; | 875 |
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance; | |
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone; | |
They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave up their arms, and march’d back prisoners of war. | |
|
They were the glory of the race of rangers; | |
Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship, | 880 |
Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate, | |
Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters, | |
Not a single one over thirty years of age. | |
|
The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads, and massacred—it was beautiful early summer; | |
The work commenced about five o’clock, and was over by eight. | 885 |
|
None obey’d the command to kneel; | |
Some made a mad and helpless rush—some stood stark and straight; | |
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart—the living and dead lay together; | |
The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt—the newcomers saw them there; | |
Some, half-kill’d, attempted to crawl away; | 890 |
These were despatch’d with bayonets, or batter’d with the blunts of muskets; | |
A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him; | |
The three were all torn, and cover’d with the boy’s blood. | |
|
At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies: | |
That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men. | 895 |
|
35
Would you hear of an old-fashion’d sea-fight? | |
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? | |
List to the story as my grandmother’s father, the sailor, told it to me. | |
|
Our foe was no skulk in his ship, I tell you, (said he;) | |
His was the surly English pluck—and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; | 900 |
Along the lower’d eve he came, horribly raking us. | |
|
We closed with him—the yards entangled—the cannon touch’d; | |
My captain lash’d fast with his own hands. | |
|
We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water; | |
On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around, and blowing up overhead. | 905 |
|
Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark; | |
Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported; | |
The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the afterhold, to give them a chance for themselves. | |
|
The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, | |
They see so many strange faces, they do not know whom to trust. | 910 |
|
Our frigate takes fire; | |
The other asks if we demand quarter? | |
If our colors are struck, and the fighting is done? | |
|
Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, | |
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. | 915 |
|
Only three guns are in use; | |
One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast; | |
Two, well served with grape and canister, silence his musketry and clear his decks. | |
|
The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top; | |
They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. | 920 |
|
Not a moment’s cease; | |
The leaks gain fast on the pumps—the fire eats toward the powder-magazine. | |
|
One of the pumps has been shot away—it is generally thought we are sinking. | |
|
Serene stands the little captain; | |
He is not hurried—his voice is neither high nor low; | 925 |
His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. | |
|
Toward twelve at night, there in the beams of the moon, they surrender to us. | |
|
36
Stretch’d and still lies the midnight; | |
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness; | |
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking—preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d; | 930 |
The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet; | |
Near by, the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin; | |
The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers; | |
The flames, spite of all that can be done, flickering aloft and below; | |
The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty; | 935 |
Formless stacks of bodies, and bodies by themselves—dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, | |
Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, | |
Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, | |
Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, | |
The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, | 940 |
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan; | |
These so—these irretrievable. | |
|
37
O Christ! This is mastering me! | |
In at the conquer’d doors they crowd. I am possess’d. | |
|
I embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering; | 945 |
See myself in prison shaped like another man, | |
And feel the dull unintermitted pain. | |
|
For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch; | |
It is I let out in the morning, and barr’d at night. | |
|
Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail, but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side; | 950 |
(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one, with sweat on my twitching lips.) | |
|
Not a youngster is taken for larceny, but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced. | |
|
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at the last gasp; | |
My face is ash-color’d—my sinews gnarl—away from me people retreat. | |
|
Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them; | 955 |
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg. | |
|
38
Enough! enough! enough! | |
Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back! | |
Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping; | |
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake. | 960 |
|
That I could forget the mockers and insults! | |
That I could forget the trickling tears, and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers! | |
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning. | |
|
I remember now; | |
I resume the overstaid fraction; | 965 |
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves; | |
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me. | |
|
I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession; | |
Inland and sea-coast we go, and we pass all boundary lines; | |
Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth; | 970 |
The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years. | |
|
Eleves, I salute you! come forward! | |
Continue your annotations, continue your questionings. | |
|
39
The friendly and flowing savage, Who is he? | |
Is he waiting for civilization, or past it, and mastering it? | 975 |
|
Is he some south-westerner, rais’d out-doors? Is he Kanadian? | |
Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California? the mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or from the sea? | |
|
Wherever he goes, men and women accept and desire him; | |
They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them. | |
|
Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naiveté, | 980 |
Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations; | |
They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers; | |
They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath—they fly out of the glance of his eyes. | |
|
40
Flaunt of the sunshine, I need not your bask,—lie over! | |
You light surfaces only—I force surfaces and depths also. | 985 |
|
Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands; | |
Say, old Top-knot! what do you want? | |
|
Man or woman! I might tell how I like you, but cannot; | |
And might tell what it is in me, and what it is in you, but cannot; | |
And might tell that pining I have—that pulse of my nights and days. | 990 |
|
Behold! I do not give lectures, or a little charity; | |
When I give, I give myself. | |
|
You there, impotent, loose in the knees! | |
Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you; | |
Spread your palms, and lift the flaps of your pockets; | 995 |
I am not to be denied—I compel—I have stores plenty and to spare; | |
And anything I have I bestow. | |
|
I do not ask who you are—that is not so important to me; | |
You can do nothing, and be nothing, but what I will infold you. | |
|
To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean; | 1000 |
On his right cheek I put the family kiss, | |
And in my soul I swear, I never will deny him. | |
|
On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes; | |
(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.) | |
|
To any one dying—thither I speed, and twist the knob of the door; | 1005 |
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed; | |
Let the physician and the priest go home. | |
|
I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will. | |
|
O despairer, here is my neck; | |
By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me. | 1010 |
|
I dilate you with tremendous breath—I buoy you up; | |
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force, | |
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves. | |
|
Sleep! I and they keep guard all night; | |
Not doubt—not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you; | 1015 |
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself; | |
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so. | |
|
41
I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs; | |
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help. | |
|
I heard what was said of the universe; | 1020 |
Heard it and heard it of several thousand years: | |
It is middling well as far as it goes,—But is that all? | |
|
Magnifying and applying come I, | |
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, | |
Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, | 1025 |
Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson; | |
Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, | |
In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, | |
With Odin, and the hideous-faced Mexitli, and every idol and image; | |
Taking them all for what they are worth, and not a cent more; | 1030 |
Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days; | |
(They bore mites, as for unfledg’d birds, who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves;) | |
Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself— bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see; | |
Discovering as much, or more, in a framer framing a house; | |
Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves, driving the mallet and chisel; | 1035 |
Not objecting to special revelations—considering a curl of smoke, or a hair on the back of my hand, just as curious as any revelation; | |
Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the Gods of the antique wars; | |
Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, | |
Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths—their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames: | |
By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born; | 1040 |
Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg’d out at their waists; | |
The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come, | |
Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother, and sit by him while he is tried for forgery; | |
What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then; | |
The bull and the bug never worship’d half enough; | 1045 |
Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d; | |
The supernatural of no account—myself waiting my time to be one of the Supremes; | |
The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious: | |
By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator; | |
Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows. | 1050 |
|
42
A call in the midst of the crowd; | |
My own voice, orotund, sweeping, and final. | |
|
Come my children; | |
Come my boys and girls, my women, household, and intimates; | |
Now the performer launches his nerve—he has pass’d his prelude on the reeds within. | 1055 |
|
Easily written, loose-finger’d chords! I feel the thrum of your climax and close. | |
|
My head slues round on my neck; | |
Music rolls, but not from the organ; | |
Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine. | |
|
Ever the hard, unsunk ground; | 1060 |
Ever the eaters and drinkers—ever the upward and downward sun—ever the air and the ceaseless tides; | |
Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real; | |
Ever the old inexplicable query—ever that thorn’d thumb—that breath of itches and thirsts; | |
Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides, and bring him forth; | |
Ever love—ever the sobbing liquid of life; | 1065 |
Ever the bandage under the chin—ever the tressels of death. | |
|
Here and there, with dimes on the eyes, walking; | |
To feed the greed of the belly, the brains liberally spooning; | |
Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going; | |
Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving; | 1070 |
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. | |
|
This is the city, and I am one of the citizens; | |
Whatever interests the rest interests me—politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, | |
Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate, and personal estate. | |
|
The little plentiful mannikins, skipping around in collars and tail’d coats, | 1075 |
I am aware who they are—(they are positively not worms or fleas.) | |
|
I acknowledge the duplicates of myself—the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me; | |
What I do and say, the same waits for them; | |
Every thought that flounders in me, the same flounders in them. | |
|
I know perfectly well my own egotism; | 1080 |
I know my omnivorous lines, and will not write any less; | |
And would fetch you, whoever you are, flush with myself. | |
|
No words of routine are mine, | |
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond, yet nearer bring: | |
This printed and bound book—but the printer, and the printing-office boy? | 1085 |
The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms? | |
The black ship, mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets—but the pluck of the captain and engineers? | |
In the houses, the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes? | |
The sky up there—yet here, or next door, or across the way? | |
The saints and sages in history—but you yourself? | 1090 |
Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain, | |
And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life? | |
|
43
I do not despise you, priests; | |
My faith is the greatest of faiths, and the least of faiths, | |
Enclosing worship ancient and modern, and all between ancient and modern, | 1095 |
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, | |
Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the Gods, saluting the sun, | |
Making a fetish of the first rock or stump, powwowing with sticks in the circle of obis, | |
Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, | |
Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession—rapt and austere in the woods, a gymnosophist, | 1100 |
Drinking mead from the skull-cup—to Shastas and Vedas admirant—minding the Koran, | |
Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, | |
Accepting the Gospels—accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, | |
To the mass kneeling, or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, | |
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me, | 1105 |
Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, | |
Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits. | |
|
One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang, I turn and talk, like a man leaving charges before a journey. | |
|
Down-hearted doubters, dull and excluded, | |
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical; | 1110 |
I know every one of you—I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief. | |
|
How the flukes splash! | |
How they contort, rapid as lightning, with spasms, and spouts of blood! | |
|
Be at peace, bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers; | |
I take my place among you as much as among any; | 1115 |
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same, | |
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same. | |
|
I do not know what is untried and afterward; | |
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail. | |
|
Each who passes is consider’d—each who stops is consider’d—not a single one can it fail. | 1120 |
|
It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried, | |
Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side, | |
Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back, and was never seen again, | |
Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall, | |
Nor him in the poor house, tubercled by rum and the bad disorder, | 1125 |
Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d—nor the brutish koboo call’d the ordure of humanity, | |
Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in, | |
Nor anything in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth, | |
Nor anything in the myriads of spheres—nor one of the myriads of myriads that inhabit them, | |
Nor the present—nor the least wisp that is known. | 1130 |
|
44
It is time to explain myself—Let us stand up. | |
|
What is known I strip away; | |
I launch all men and women forward with me into THE UNKNOWN. | |
|
The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate? | |
|
We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers; | 1135 |
There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. | |
|
Births have brought us richness and variety, | |
And other births will bring us richness and variety. | |
|
I do not call one greater and one smaller; | |
That which fills its period and place is equal to any. | 1140 |
|
Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister? | |
I am sorry for you—they are not murderous or jealous upon me; | |
All has been gentle with me—I keep no account with lamentation; | |
(What have I to do with lamentation?) | |
|
I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be. | 1145 |
|
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs; | |
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps; | |
All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount. | |
|
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me; | |
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing—I know I was even there; | 1150 |
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, | |
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. | |
|
Long I was hugg’d close—long and long. | |
|
Immense have been the preparations for me, | |
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me. | 1155 |
|
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen; | |
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings; | |
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. | |
|
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me; | |
My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it. | 1160 |
|
For it the nebula cohered to an orb, | |
The long slow strata piled to rest it on, | |
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, | |
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care. | |
|
All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me; | 1165 |
Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul. | |
|
45
O span of youth! Ever-push’d elasticity! | |
O manhood, balanced, florid, and full. | |
|
My lovers suffocate me! | |
Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin, | 1170 |
Jostling me through streets and public halls—coming naked to me at night, | |
Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river—swinging and chirping over my head, | |
Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush, | |
Lighting on every moment of my life, | |
Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses, | 1175 |
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts, and giving them to be mine. | |
|
Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days! | |
|
Every condition promulges not only itself—it promulges what grows after and out of itself, | |
And the dark hush promulges as much as any. | |
|
I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, | 1180 |
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim of the farther systems. | |
|
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, | |
Outward and outward, and forever outward. | |
|
My sun has his sun, and round him obediently wheels, | |
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, | 1185 |
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them. | |
|
There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage; | |
If 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; | |
We should surely bring up again where we now stand, | |
And as surely go as much farther—and then farther and farther. | 1190 |
|
A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span, or make it impatient; | |
They are but parts—anything is but a part. | |
|
See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that; | |
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. | |
|
My rendezvous is appointed—it is certain; | 1195 |
The Lord will be there, and wait till I come, on perfect terms; | |
(The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine, will be there.) | |
|
46
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured, and never will be measured. | |
|
I tramp a perpetual journey—(come listen all!) | |
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods; | 1200 |
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair; | |
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy; | |
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, or exchange; | |
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, | |
My left hand hooking you round the waist, | 1205 |
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road. | |
|
Not I—not any one else, can travel that road for you, | |
You must travel it for yourself. | |
|
It is not far—it is within reach; | |
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know; | 1210 |
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land. | |
|
Shoulder your duds, dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, | |
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. | |
|
If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, | |
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me; | 1215 |
For after we start, we never lie by again. | |
|
This day before dawn I ascended a hill, and look’d at the crowded heaven, | |
And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then? | |
And my Spirit said, No, we but level that life, to pass and continue beyond. | |
|
You are also asking me questions, and I hear you; | 1220 |
I answer that I cannot answer—you must find out for yourself. | |
|
Sit a while, dear son; | |
Here are biscuits to eat, and here is milk to drink; | |
But as soon as you sleep, and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-bye kiss, and open the gate for your egress hence. | |
|
Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams; | 1225 |
Now I wash the gum from your eyes; | |
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light, and of every moment of your life. | |
|
Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore; | |
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, | |
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. | 1230 |
|
47
I am the teacher of athletes; | |
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own, proves the width of my own; | |
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. | |
|
The boy I love, the same becomes a man, not through derived power, but in his own right, | |
Wicked, rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, | 1235 |
Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, | |
Unrequited love, or a slight, cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts, | |
First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song, or play on the banjo, | |
Preferring scars, and the beard, and faces pitted with small-pox, over all latherers, | |
And those well tann’d to those that keep out of the sun. | 1240 |
|
I teach straying from me—yet who can stray from me? | |
I follow you, whoever you are, from the present hour; | |
My words itch at your ears till you understand them. | |
|
I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat; | |
It is you talking just as much as myself—I act as the tongue of you; | 1245 |
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d. | |
|
I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house, | |
And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air. | |
|
If you would understand me, go to the heights or water-shore; | |
The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key; | 1250 |
The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words. | |
|
No shutter’d room or school can commune with me, | |
But roughs and little children better than they. | |
|
The young mechanic is closest to me—he knows me well; | |
The woodman, that takes his axe and jug with him, shall take me with him all day; | 1255 |
The farm-boy, ploughing in the field, feels good at the sound of my voice; | |
In vessels that sail, my words sail—I go with fishermen and seamen, and love them. | |
|
The soldier camp’d, or upon the march, is mine; | |
On the night ere the pending battle, many seek me, and I do not fail them; | |
On the solemn night (it may be their last,) those that know me, seek me. | 1260 |
|
My face rubs to the hunter’s face, when he lies down alone in his blanket; | |
The driver, thinking of me, does not mind the jolt of his wagon; | |
The young mother and old mother comprehend me; | |
The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment, and forget where they are; | |
They and all would resume what I have told them. | 1265 |
|
48
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, | |
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul; | |
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, | |
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud, | |
And I or you, pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth, | 1270 |
And to glance with an eye, or show a bean in its pod, confounds the learning of all times, | |
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, | |
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe, | |
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. | |
|
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, | 1275 |
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God; | |
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.) | |
|
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, | |
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. | |
|
Why should I wish to see God better than this day? | 1280 |
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then; | |
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass; | |
I find letters from God dropt in the street—and every one is sign’d by God’s name, | |
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, | |
Others will punctually come forever and ever. | 1285 |
|
49
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. | |
|
To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes; | |
I see the elder-hand, pressing, receiving, supporting; | |
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors, | |
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape. | 1290 |
|
And as to you, Corpse, I think you are good manure—but that does not offend me; | |
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, | |
I reach to the leafy lips—I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons. | |
|
And as to you Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths; | |
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) | 1295 |
|
I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven; | |
O suns! O grass of graves! O perpetual transfers and promotions! | |
If you do not say anything, how can I say anything? | |
|
Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest, | |
Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight, | 1300 |
Toss, sparkles of day and dusk! toss on the black stems that decay in the muck! | |
Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs. | |
|
I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night; | |
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected; | |
And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small. | 1305 |
|
50
There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. | |
|
Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes; | |
I sleep—I sleep long. | |
|
I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid; | |
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. | 1310 |
|
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on; | |
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. | |
|
Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. | |
|
Do you see, O my brothers and sisters? | |
It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is HAPPINESS. | 1315 |
|
51
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, | |
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. | |
|
Listener up there! Here, you! What have you to confide to me? | |
Look in my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening; | |
Talk honestly—no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer. | 1320 |
|
Do I contradict myself? | |
Very well, then, I contradict myself; | |
(I am large—I contain multitudes.) | |
|
I concentrate toward them that are nigh—I wait on the door-slab. | |
|
Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper? | 1325 |
Who wishes to walk with me? | |
|
Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late? | |
|
52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering. | |
|
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable; | |
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. | 1330 |
|
The last scud of day holds back for me; | |
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds; | |
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. | |
|
I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun; | |
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. | 1335 |
|
I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love; | |
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles. | |
|
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean; | |
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, | |
And filter and fibre your blood. | 1340 |
|
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged; | |
Missing me one place, search another; | |
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.
Walt Whitman, 1819–1892
|