github.com/scottcagno/storage@v1.8.0/pkg/filesystem/ww.txt (about)

     1  1
     2  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
     3  And what I assume you shall assume,
     4  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
     5  
     6  I loafe and invite my soul,
     7  I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
     8  
     9  My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
    10  Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
    11  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
    12  Hoping to cease not till death.
    13  
    14  Creeds and schools in abeyance,
    15  Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
    16  I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
    17  Nature without check with original energy.
    18  
    19  2
    20  Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
    21  I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
    22  The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
    23  
    24  The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
    25  It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
    26  I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
    27  I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
    28  
    29  The smoke of my own breath,
    30  Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
    31  My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
    32  The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
    33  The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
    34  A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
    35  The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
    36  The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
    37  The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
    38  
    39  Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
    40  Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
    41  Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
    42  
    43  Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
    44  You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
    45  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,
    46  You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
    47  You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
    48  
    49  3
    50  I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
    51  But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
    52  
    53  There was never any more inception than there is now,
    54  Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
    55  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
    56  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
    57  
    58  Urge and urge and urge,
    59  Always the procreant urge of the world.
    60  
    61  Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
    62  Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
    63  
    64  To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.
    65  
    66  Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
    67  Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
    68  I and this mystery here we stand.
    69  
    70  Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
    71  
    72  Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
    73  Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
    74  
    75  Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
    76  Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
    77  
    78  Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
    79  Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
    80  
    81  I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
    82  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,
    83  Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
    84  Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
    85  That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
    86  And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
    87  Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?
    88  
    89  4
    90  Trippers and askers surround me,
    91  People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
    92  The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
    93  My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
    94  The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
    95  The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
    96  Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
    97  These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
    98  But they are not the Me myself.
    99  
   100  Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
   101  Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
   102  Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
   103  Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
   104  Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
   105  
   106  Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
   107  I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
   108  
   109  5
   110  I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
   111  And you must not be abased to the other.
   112  
   113  Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
   114  Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
   115  Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
   116  
   117  I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
   118  How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
   119  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
   120  And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
   121  
   122  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
   123  And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
   124  And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
   125  And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
   126  And that a kelson of the creation is love,
   127  And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
   128  And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
   129  And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
   130  
   131  6
   132  A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
   133  How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
   134  
   135  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
   136  
   137  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
   138  A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
   139  Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
   140  
   141  Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
   142  
   143  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
   144  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
   145  Growing among black folks as among white,
   146  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
   147  
   148  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
   149  
   150  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
   151  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
   152  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
   153  It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
   154  And here you are the mothers’ laps.
   155  
   156  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
   157  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
   158  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
   159  
   160  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
   161  And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
   162  
   163  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
   164  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
   165  
   166  What do you think has become of the young and old men?
   167  And what do you think has become of the women and children?
   168  
   169  They are alive and well somewhere,
   170  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
   171  And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
   172  And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
   173  
   174  All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
   175  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
   176  
   177  7
   178  Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
   179  I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
   180  
   181  I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
   182  And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
   183  The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
   184  
   185  I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
   186  I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
   187  (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
   188  
   189  Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
   190  For me those that have been boys and that love women,
   191  For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
   192  For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
   193  For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
   194  For me children and the begetters of children.
   195  
   196  Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
   197  I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
   198  And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.
   199  
   200  8
   201  The little one sleeps in its cradle,
   202  I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.
   203  
   204  The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
   205  I peeringly view them from the top.
   206  
   207  The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
   208  I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.
   209  
   210  The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
   211  The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
   212  The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
   213  The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,
   214  The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
   215  The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
   216  The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
   217  The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
   218  What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits,
   219  What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
   220  What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,
   221  Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
   222  I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart.
   223  
   224  9
   225  The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
   226  The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
   227  The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
   228  The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.
   229  
   230  I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load,
   231  I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
   232  I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
   233  And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.
   234  
   235  10
   236  Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
   237  Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
   238  In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
   239  Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game,
   240  Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.
   241  
   242  The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,
   243  
   244  My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.
   245  
   246  The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
   247  I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
   248  You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.
   249  
   250  I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,
   251  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,
   252  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,
   253  She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.
   254  
   255  The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
   256  I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
   257  Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
   258  And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
   259  And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
   260  And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
   261  And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
   262  And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
   263  He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
   264  I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.
   265  
   266  11
   267  Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
   268  Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
   269  Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
   270  
   271  She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
   272  She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
   273  
   274  Which of the young men does she like the best?
   275  Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
   276  
   277  Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
   278  You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
   279  
   280  Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
   281  The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
   282  
   283  The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
   284  Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
   285  
   286  An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
   287  It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
   288  
   289  The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
   290  They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
   291  They do not think whom they souse with spray.
   292  
   293  12
   294  The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,
   295  I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.
   296  
   297  Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
   298  Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.
   299  
   300  From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,
   301  The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
   302  Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
   303  They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.
   304  
   305  13
   306  The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,
   307  The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece,
   308  His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band,
   309  His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,
   310  The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs.
   311  
   312  I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,
   313  I go with the team also.
   314  
   315  In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,
   316  To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,
   317  Absorbing all to myself and for this song.
   318  
   319  Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
   320  It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
   321  
   322  My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
   323  They rise together, they slowly circle around.
   324  
   325  I believe in those wing’d purposes,
   326  And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
   327  And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
   328  And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
   329  And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
   330  And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.
   331  
   332  14
   333  The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
   334  Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
   335  The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
   336  Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.
   337  
   338  The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,
   339  The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
   340  The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,
   341  I see in them and myself the same old law.
   342  
   343  The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
   344  They scorn the best I can do to relate them.
   345  
   346  I am enamour’d of growing out-doors,
   347  Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
   348  Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,
   349  I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.
   350  
   351  What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
   352  Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
   353  Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
   354  Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
   355  Scattering it freely forever.
   356  
   357  15
   358  The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
   359  The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
   360  The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
   361  The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
   362  The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
   363  
   364  The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
   365  The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,
   366  The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
   367  The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,
   368  The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,
   369  (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;)
   370  The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
   371  He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
   372  The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,
   373  What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
   374  The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,
   375  The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,
   376  The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)
   377  The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
   378  The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,
   379  Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;
   380  The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
   381  As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,
   382  The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,
   383  The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the musical rain,
   384  The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
   385  The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,
   386  The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,
   387  As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,
   388  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,
   389  The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,
   390  The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,
   391  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 blue and gold,
   392  The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,
   393  The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,
   394  The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
   395  The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)
   396  The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,
   397  The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)
   398  The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,
   399  The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips,
   400  The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
   401  The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
   402  (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
   403  The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,
   404  On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,
   405  The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,
   406  The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,
   407  As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change,
   408  The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
   409  In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
   410  Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
   411  Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground;
   412  Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,
   413  The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,
   414  Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,
   415  Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
   416  Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
   417  
   418  Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,
   419  In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport,
   420  The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
   421  The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
   422  The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
   423  And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
   424  And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
   425  And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
   426  
   427  16
   428  I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
   429  Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
   430  Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
   431  Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,
   432  One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
   433  A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
   434  A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
   435  A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
   436  A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
   437  At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,
   438  At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
   439  At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,
   440  Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)
   441  Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,
   442  A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
   443  A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
   444  Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
   445  A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
   446  Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.
   447  
   448  I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
   449  Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
   450  And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
   451  
   452  (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
   453  The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
   454  The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)
   455  
   456  17
   457  These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
   458  If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
   459  If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
   460  If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
   461  
   462  This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
   463  This the common air that bathes the globe.
   464  
   465  18
   466  With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
   467  I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons.
   468  
   469  Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
   470  I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
   471  
   472  I beat and pound for the dead,
   473  I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.
   474  
   475  Vivas to those who have fail’d!
   476  And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
   477  And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
   478  And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
   479  And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
   480  
   481  19
   482  This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
   483  It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
   484  I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
   485  The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
   486  The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
   487  There shall be no difference between them and the rest.
   488  
   489  This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
   490  This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
   491  This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
   492  This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.
   493  
   494  Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
   495  Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.
   496  
   497  Do you take it I would astonish?
   498  Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?
   499  Do I astonish more than they?
   500  
   501  This hour I tell things in confidence,
   502  I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.
   503  
   504  20
   505  Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
   506  How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
   507  
   508  What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?
   509  
   510  All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
   511  Else it were time lost listening to me.
   512  
   513  I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
   514  That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.
   515  
   516  Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,
   517  I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.
   518  
   519  Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
   520  
   521  Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,
   522  I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
   523  
   524  In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
   525  And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
   526  
   527  I know I am solid and sound,
   528  To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
   529  All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
   530  
   531  I know I am deathless,
   532  I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
   533  I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
   534  
   535  I know I am august,
   536  I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
   537  I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
   538  (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)
   539  
   540  I exist as I am, that is enough,
   541  If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
   542  And if each and all be aware I sit content.
   543  
   544  One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
   545  And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
   546  I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
   547  
   548  My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
   549  I laugh at what you call dissolution,
   550  And I know the amplitude of time.
   551  
   552  21
   553  I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
   554  The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
   555  The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
   556  
   557  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
   558  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
   559  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
   560  
   561  I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
   562  We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
   563  I show that size is only development.
   564  
   565  Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
   566  It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.
   567  
   568  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
   569  I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.
   570  
   571  Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night!
   572  Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
   573  Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.
   574  
   575  Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
   576  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
   577  Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!
   578  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
   579  Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
   580  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
   581  Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth!
   582  Smile, for your lover comes.
   583  
   584  Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!
   585  O unspeakable passionate love.
   586  
   587  22
   588  You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
   589  I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
   590  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
   591  We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
   592  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
   593  Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.
   594  
   595  Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
   596  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
   597  Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
   598  Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
   599  I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.
   600  
   601  Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
   602  Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.
   603  
   604  I am he attesting sympathy,
   605  (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)
   606  
   607  I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
   608  
   609  What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
   610  Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
   611  My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
   612  I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
   613  
   614  Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
   615  Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?
   616  
   617  I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,
   618  Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
   619  Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.
   620  
   621  This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
   622  There is no better than it and now.
   623  
   624  What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,
   625  The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.
   626  
   627  23
   628  Endless unfolding of words of ages!
   629  And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.
   630  
   631  A word of the faith that never balks,
   632  Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
   633  
   634  It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
   635  That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
   636  
   637  I accept Reality and dare not question it,
   638  Materialism first and last imbuing.
   639  
   640  Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
   641  Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
   642  This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,
   643  These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.
   644  This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.
   645  
   646  Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
   647  Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
   648  I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.
   649  
   650  Less the reminders of properties told my words,
   651  And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,
   652  And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt,
   653  And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.
   654  
   655  24
   656  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
   657  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
   658  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
   659  No more modest than immodest.
   660  
   661  Unscrew the locks from the doors!
   662  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
   663  
   664  Whoever degrades another degrades me,
   665  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
   666  
   667  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.
   668  
   669  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
   670  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
   671  
   672  Through me many long dumb voices,
   673  Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
   674  Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
   675  Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
   676  And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
   677  And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
   678  Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
   679  Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
   680  
   681  Through me forbidden voices,
   682  Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
   683  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.
   684  
   685  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
   686  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
   687  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
   688  
   689  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
   690  Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
   691  
   692  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
   693  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
   694  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
   695  
   696  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,
   697  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
   698  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
   699  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
   700  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
   701  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
   702  Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
   703  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
   704  Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
   705  Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
   706  Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
   707  Sun so generous it shall be you!
   708  Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
   709  You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
   710  Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
   711  Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!
   712  Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.
   713  
   714  I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
   715  Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
   716  I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
   717  Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.
   718  
   719  That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
   720  A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
   721  
   722  To behold the day-break!
   723  The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
   724  The air tastes good to my palate.
   725  
   726  Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding,
   727  Scooting obliquely high and low.
   728  
   729  Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
   730  Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.
   731  
   732  The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
   733  The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
   734  The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!
   735  
   736  25
   737  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
   738  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
   739  
   740  We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
   741  We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.
   742  
   743  My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
   744  With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
   745  
   746  Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
   747  It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
   748  Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
   749  
   750  Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,
   751  Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
   752  Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
   753  The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
   754  I underlying causes to balance them at last,
   755  My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
   756  Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)
   757  
   758  My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
   759  Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
   760  I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.
   761  
   762  Writing and talk do not prove me,
   763  I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
   764  With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.
   765  
   766  26
   767  Now I will do nothing but listen,
   768  To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
   769  
   770  I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,
   771  I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
   772  I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
   773  Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
   774  Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,
   775  The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
   776  The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,
   777  The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,
   778  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,
   779  The steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
   780  The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,
   781  (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)
   782  
   783  I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)
   784  I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
   785  It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.
   786  
   787  I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
   788  Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.
   789  
   790  A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
   791  The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.
   792  
   793  I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
   794  The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
   795  It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
   796  It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
   797  I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
   798  Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
   799  
   800  At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
   801  And that we call Being.
   802  
   803  27
   804  To be in any form, what is that?
   805  (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
   806  If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.
   807  
   808  Mine is no callous shell,
   809  I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
   810  They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
   811  
   812  I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
   813  To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
   814  
   815  28
   816  Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
   817  Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
   818  Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
   819  My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,
   820  On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
   821  Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
   822  Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
   823  Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
   824  Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
   825  Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
   826  Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
   827  They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,
   828  No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
   829  Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
   830  Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.
   831  
   832  The sentries desert every other part of me,
   833  They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
   834  They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.
   835  
   836  I am given up by traitors,
   837  I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
   838  I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.
   839  
   840  You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
   841  Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.
   842  
   843  29
   844  Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!
   845  Did it make you ache so, leaving me?
   846  
   847  Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
   848  Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.
   849  
   850  Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
   851  Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.
   852  
   853  30
   854  All truths wait in all things,
   855  They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
   856  They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
   857  The insignificant is as big to me as any,
   858  (What is less or more than a touch?)
   859  
   860  Logic and sermons never convince,
   861  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
   862  
   863  (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
   864  Only what nobody denies is so.)
   865  
   866  A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
   867  I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
   868  And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
   869  And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
   870  And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,
   871  And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.
   872  
   873  31
   874  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
   875  And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
   876  And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
   877  And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
   878  And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
   879  And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
   880  And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
   881  
   882  I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
   883  And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
   884  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
   885  But call any thing back again when I desire it.
   886  
   887  In vain the speeding or shyness,
   888  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
   889  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,
   890  In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
   891  In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
   892  In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
   893  In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
   894  In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
   895  In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,
   896  I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.
   897  
   898  32
   899  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
   900  I stand and look at them long and long.
   901  
   902  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
   903  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
   904  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
   905  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
   906  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
   907  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
   908  
   909  So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
   910  They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
   911  
   912  I wonder where they get those tokens,
   913  Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
   914  
   915  Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
   916  Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
   917  Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
   918  Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
   919  Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.
   920  
   921  A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
   922  Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
   923  Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
   924  Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.
   925  
   926  His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
   927  His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.
   928  
   929  I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
   930  Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
   931  Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.
   932  
   933  33
   934  Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,
   935  What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,
   936  What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,
   937  And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.
   938  
   939  My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
   940  I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
   941  I am afoot with my vision.
   942  
   943  By the city’s quadrangular houses—in log huts, camping with lumbermen,
   944  Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,
   945  Weeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests,
   946  Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,
   947  Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river,
   948  Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,
   949  Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish,
   950  Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
   951  Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail;
   952  Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field,
   953  Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,
   954  Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav’d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax,
   955  Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest,
   956  Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;
   957  Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs,
   958  Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,
   959  Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,
   960  Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,
   961  Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,
   962  Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides,
   963  Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;
   964  Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,
   965  Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,
   966  Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,)
   967  Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,
   968  Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,
   969  Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,
   970  Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,
   971  Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents,
   972  Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;
   973  Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,
   974  Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,
   975  Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,
   976  Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,
   977  Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,
   978  At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter,
   979  At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw,
   980  At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,
   981  At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;
   982  Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps,
   983  Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,
   984  Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,
   985  Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,
   986  Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
   987  Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near,
   988  Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,
   989  Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh,
   990  Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds,
   991  Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out,
   992  Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,
   993  Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,
   994  Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs,
   995  Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,
   996  Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well,
   997  Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
   998  Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,
   999  Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the office or public hall;
  1000  Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with the new and old,
  1001  Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,
  1002  Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,
  1003  Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,
  1004  Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting;
  1005  Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,
  1006  Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach,
  1007  My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;
  1008  Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,)
  1009  Far from the settlements studying the print of animals’ feet, or the moccasin print,
  1010  By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
  1011  Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;
  1012  Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,
  1013  Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,
  1014  Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,
  1015  Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,
  1016  Walking the old hills of Judæa with the beautiful gentle God by my side,
  1017  Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
  1018  Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,
  1019  Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,
  1020  Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,
  1021  Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
  1022  Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
  1023  I tread day and night such roads.
  1024  
  1025  I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,
  1026  And look at quintillions ripen’d and look at quintillions green.
  1027  
  1028  I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,
  1029  My course runs below the soundings of plummets.
  1030  
  1031  I help myself to material and immaterial,
  1032  No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.
  1033  
  1034  I anchor my ship for a little while only,
  1035  My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.
  1036  
  1037  I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.
  1038  
  1039  I ascend to the foretruck,
  1040  I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest,
  1041  We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,
  1042  Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,
  1043  The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions,
  1044  The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them,
  1045  We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged,
  1046  We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution,
  1047  Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city,
  1048  The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.
  1049  
  1050  I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,
  1051  I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
  1052  I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.
  1053  
  1054  My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
  1055  They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drown’d.
  1056  
  1057  I understand the large hearts of heroes,
  1058  The courage of present times and all times,
  1059  How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,
  1060  How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
  1061  And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you;
  1062  How he follow’d with them and tack’d with them three days and would not give it up,
  1063  How he saved the drifting company at last,
  1064  How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves,
  1065  How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men;
  1066  All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
  1067  I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.
  1068  
  1069  The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
  1070  The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,
  1071  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,
  1072  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,
  1073  All these I feel or am.
  1074  
  1075  I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
  1076  Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
  1077  I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
  1078  I fall on the weeds and stones,
  1079  The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
  1080  Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.
  1081  
  1082  Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
  1083  I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,
  1084  My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
  1085  
  1086  I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,
  1087  Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
  1088  Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
  1089  I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
  1090  They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.
  1091  
  1092  I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,
  1093  Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
  1094  White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps,
  1095  The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.
  1096  
  1097  Distant and dead resuscitate,
  1098  They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.
  1099  
  1100  I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment,
  1101  I am there again.
  1102  
  1103  Again the long roll of the drummers,
  1104  Again the attacking cannon, mortars,
  1105  Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.
  1106  
  1107  I take part, I see and hear the whole,
  1108  The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim’d shots,
  1109  The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,
  1110  Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,
  1111  The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,
  1112  The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.
  1113  
  1114  Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand,
  1115  He gasps through the clot Mind not me—mind—the entrenchments.
  1116  
  1117  34
  1118  Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,
  1119  (I tell not the fall of Alamo,
  1120  Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
  1121  The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)
  1122  ’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.
  1123  
  1124  Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,
  1125  Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance,
  1126  Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
  1127  They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war.
  1128  
  1129  They were the glory of the race of rangers,
  1130  Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
  1131  Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
  1132  Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
  1133  Not a single one over thirty years of age.
  1134  
  1135  The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer,
  1136  The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.
  1137  
  1138  None obey’d the command to kneel,
  1139  Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,
  1140  A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together,
  1141  The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,
  1142  Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away,
  1143  These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets,
  1144  A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him,
  1145  The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood.
  1146  
  1147  At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;
  1148  That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.
  1149  
  1150  35
  1151  Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
  1152  Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
  1153  List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me.
  1154  
  1155  Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
  1156  His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;
  1157  Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us.
  1158  
  1159  We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d,
  1160  My captain lash’d fast with his own hands.
  1161  
  1162  We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water,
  1163  On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead.
  1164  
  1165  Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,
  1166  Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported,
  1167  The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves.
  1168  
  1169  The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,
  1170  They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.
  1171  
  1172  Our frigate takes fire,
  1173  The other asks if we demand quarter?
  1174  If our colors are struck and the fighting done?
  1175  
  1176  Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
  1177  We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.
  1178  
  1179  Only three guns are in use,
  1180  One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast,
  1181  Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks.
  1182  
  1183  The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top,
  1184  They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.
  1185  
  1186  Not a moment’s cease,
  1187  The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.
  1188  
  1189  One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.
  1190  
  1191  Serene stands the little captain,
  1192  He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
  1193  His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.
  1194  
  1195  Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.
  1196  
  1197  36
  1198  Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,
  1199  Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
  1200  Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d,
  1201  The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,
  1202  Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,
  1203  The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers,
  1204  The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
  1205  The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
  1206  Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,
  1207  Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
  1208  Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
  1209  A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
  1210  Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
  1211  The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
  1212  Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,
  1213  These so, these irretrievable.
  1214  
  1215  37
  1216  You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
  1217  In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!
  1218  Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,
  1219  See myself in prison shaped like another man,
  1220  And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
  1221  
  1222  For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
  1223  It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.
  1224  
  1225  Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side,
  1226  (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)
  1227  
  1228  Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.
  1229  
  1230  Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
  1231  My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.
  1232  
  1233  Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
  1234  I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.
  1235  
  1236  38
  1237  Enough! enough! enough!
  1238  Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!
  1239  Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,
  1240  I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
  1241  
  1242  That I could forget the mockers and insults!
  1243  That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!
  1244  That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.
  1245  
  1246  I remember now,
  1247  I resume the overstaid fraction,
  1248  The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
  1249  Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.
  1250  
  1251  I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
  1252  Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
  1253  Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
  1254  The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.
  1255  
  1256  Eleves, I salute you! come forward!
  1257  Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.
  1258  
  1259  39
  1260  The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
  1261  Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?
  1262  
  1263  Is he some Southwesterner rais’d out-doors? is he Kanadian?
  1264  Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?
  1265  The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?
  1266  
  1267  Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
  1268  They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.
  1269  
  1270  Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naiveté,
  1271  Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,
  1272  They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,
  1273  They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes.
  1274  
  1275  40
  1276  Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask—lie over!
  1277  You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.
  1278  
  1279  Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,
  1280  Say, old top-knot, what do you want?
  1281  
  1282  Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,
  1283  And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,
  1284  And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.
  1285  
  1286  Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
  1287  When I give I give myself.
  1288  
  1289  You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
  1290  Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you,
  1291  Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,
  1292  I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,
  1293  And any thing I have I bestow.
  1294  
  1295  I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,
  1296  You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.
  1297  
  1298  To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,
  1299  On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
  1300  And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.
  1301  
  1302  On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.
  1303  (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)
  1304  
  1305  To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.
  1306  Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
  1307  Let the physician and the priest go home.
  1308  
  1309  I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
  1310  O despairer, here is my neck,
  1311  By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.
  1312  
  1313  I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
  1314  Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,
  1315  Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.
  1316  
  1317  Sleep—I and they keep guard all night,
  1318  Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
  1319  I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
  1320  And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.
  1321  
  1322  41
  1323  I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
  1324  And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.
  1325  
  1326  I heard what was said of the universe,
  1327  Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;
  1328  It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all?
  1329  
  1330  Magnifying and applying come I,
  1331  Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
  1332  Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
  1333  Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,
  1334  Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
  1335  In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,
  1336  With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,
  1337  Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,
  1338  Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,
  1339  (They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)
  1340  Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,
  1341  Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,
  1342  Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel,
  1343  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,
  1344  Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,
  1345  Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
  1346  Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
  1347  By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born,
  1348  Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg’d out at their waists,
  1349  The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,
  1350  Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
  1351  What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then,
  1352  The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough,
  1353  Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d,
  1354  The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,
  1355  The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;
  1356  By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
  1357  Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.
  1358  
  1359  42
  1360  A call in the midst of the crowd,
  1361  My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.
  1362  
  1363  Come my children,
  1364  Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,
  1365  Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass’d his prelude on the reeds within.
  1366  
  1367  Easily written loose-finger’d chords—I feel the thrum of your climax and close.
  1368  
  1369  My head slues round on my neck,
  1370  Music rolls, but not from the organ,
  1371  Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.
  1372  
  1373  Ever the hard unsunk ground,
  1374  Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,
  1375  Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,
  1376  Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,
  1377  Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,
  1378  Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
  1379  Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.
  1380  
  1381  Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
  1382  To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
  1383  Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
  1384  Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,
  1385  A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.
  1386  
  1387  This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
  1388  Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,
  1389  The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.
  1390  
  1391  The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats,
  1392  I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)
  1393  I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,
  1394  What I do and say the same waits for them,
  1395  Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.
  1396  
  1397  I know perfectly well my own egotism,
  1398  Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
  1399  And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.
  1400  
  1401  Not words of routine this song of mine,
  1402  But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
  1403  This printed and bound book—but the printer and the printing-office boy?
  1404  The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
  1405  The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets—but the pluck of the captain and engineers?
  1406  In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
  1407  The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way?
  1408  The saints and sages in history—but you yourself?
  1409  Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain,
  1410  And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?
  1411  
  1412  43
  1413  I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
  1414  My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
  1415  Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,
  1416  Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,
  1417  Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,
  1418  Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis,
  1419  Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
  1420  Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,
  1421  Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,
  1422  Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,
  1423  Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine,
  1424  To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew,
  1425  Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me,
  1426  Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,
  1427  Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.
  1428  
  1429  One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey.
  1430  
  1431  Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
  1432  Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical,
  1433  I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.
  1434  
  1435  How the flukes splash!
  1436  How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!
  1437  
  1438  Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
  1439  I take my place among you as much as among any,
  1440  The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
  1441  And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.
  1442  
  1443  I do not know what is untried and afterward,
  1444  But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.
  1445  
  1446  Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail.
  1447  
  1448  It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,
  1449  Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
  1450  Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again,
  1451  Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall,
  1452  Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,
  1453  Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d, nor the brutish koboo call’d the ordure of humanity,
  1454  Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,
  1455  Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,
  1456  Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them,
  1457  Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.
  1458  
  1459  44
  1460  It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.
  1461  
  1462  What is known I strip away,
  1463  I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.
  1464  
  1465  The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?
  1466  
  1467  We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
  1468  There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.
  1469  
  1470  Births have brought us richness and variety,
  1471  And other births will bring us richness and variety.
  1472  
  1473  I do not call one greater and one smaller,
  1474  That which fills its period and place is equal to any.
  1475  
  1476  Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
  1477  I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
  1478  All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
  1479  (What have I to do with lamentation?)
  1480  
  1481  I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.
  1482  
  1483  My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
  1484  On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
  1485  All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.
  1486  
  1487  Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
  1488  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
  1489  I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
  1490  And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
  1491  
  1492  Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.
  1493  
  1494  Immense have been the preparations for me,
  1495  Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.
  1496  
  1497  Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
  1498  For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
  1499  They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
  1500  
  1501  Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
  1502  My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
  1503  
  1504  For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
  1505  The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
  1506  Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
  1507  Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.
  1508  
  1509  All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
  1510  Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.
  1511  
  1512  45
  1513  O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity!
  1514  O manhood, balanced, florid and full.
  1515  
  1516  My lovers suffocate me,
  1517  Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
  1518  Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
  1519  Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,
  1520  Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
  1521  Lighting on every moment of my life,
  1522  Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
  1523  Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.
  1524  
  1525  Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!
  1526  
  1527  Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
  1528  And the dark hush promulges as much as any.
  1529  
  1530  I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
  1531  And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.
  1532  
  1533  Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
  1534  Outward and outward and forever outward.
  1535  
  1536  My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
  1537  He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
  1538  And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.
  1539  
  1540  There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
  1541  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,
  1542  We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
  1543  And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.
  1544  
  1545  A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
  1546  They are but parts, any thing is but a part.
  1547  
  1548  See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
  1549  Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.
  1550  
  1551  My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
  1552  The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
  1553  The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.
  1554  
  1555  46
  1556  I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.
  1557  
  1558  I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
  1559  My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
  1560  No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
  1561  I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
  1562  I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
  1563  But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
  1564  My left hand hooking you round the waist,
  1565  My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
  1566  
  1567  Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
  1568  You must travel it for yourself.
  1569  
  1570  It is not far, it is within reach,
  1571  Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
  1572  Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
  1573  
  1574  Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
  1575  Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.
  1576  
  1577  If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
  1578  And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
  1579  For after we start we never lie by again.
  1580  
  1581  This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,
  1582  And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?
  1583  And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.
  1584  
  1585  You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
  1586  I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.
  1587  
  1588  Sit a while dear son,
  1589  Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
  1590  But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.
  1591  
  1592  Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
  1593  Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
  1594  You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
  1595  
  1596  Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
  1597  Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
  1598  To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
  1599  
  1600  47
  1601  I am the teacher of athletes,
  1602  He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
  1603  He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
  1604  
  1605  The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,
  1606  Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
  1607  Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
  1608  Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
  1609  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,
  1610  Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers,
  1611  And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun.
  1612  
  1613  I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
  1614  I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
  1615  My words itch at your ears till you understand them.
  1616  
  1617  I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,
  1618  (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
  1619  Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)
  1620  
  1621  I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
  1622  And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.
  1623  
  1624  If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
  1625  The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,
  1626  The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.
  1627  
  1628  No shutter’d room or school can commune with me,
  1629  But roughs and little children better than they.
  1630  
  1631  The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,
  1632  The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day,
  1633  The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,
  1634  In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them.
  1635  
  1636  The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,
  1637  On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,
  1638  On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.
  1639  
  1640  My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket,
  1641  The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,
  1642  The young mother and old mother comprehend me,
  1643  The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,
  1644  They and all would resume what I have told them.
  1645  
  1646  48
  1647  I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
  1648  And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
  1649  And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
  1650  And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
  1651  And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
  1652  And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
  1653  And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
  1654  And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
  1655  And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
  1656  
  1657  And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
  1658  For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
  1659  (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)
  1660  
  1661  I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
  1662  Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
  1663  
  1664  Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
  1665  I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
  1666  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
  1667  I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
  1668  And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
  1669  Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
  1670  
  1671  49
  1672  And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.
  1673  
  1674  To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
  1675  I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
  1676  I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
  1677  And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.
  1678  
  1679  And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
  1680  I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
  1681  I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.
  1682  
  1683  And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
  1684  (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)
  1685  
  1686  I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
  1687  O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
  1688  If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?
  1689  
  1690  Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
  1691  Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,
  1692  Toss, sparkles of day and dusk—toss on the black stems that decay in the muck,
  1693  Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.
  1694  
  1695  I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
  1696  I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
  1697  And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.
  1698  
  1699  50
  1700  There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.
  1701  
  1702  Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes,
  1703  I sleep—I sleep long.
  1704  
  1705  I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid,
  1706  It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
  1707  
  1708  Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
  1709  To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
  1710  
  1711  Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
  1712  
  1713  Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
  1714  It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.
  1715  
  1716  51
  1717  The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
  1718  And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
  1719  
  1720  Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
  1721  Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
  1722  (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
  1723  
  1724  Do I contradict myself?
  1725  Very well then I contradict myself,
  1726  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
  1727  
  1728  I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
  1729  
  1730  Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
  1731  Who wishes to walk with me?
  1732  
  1733  Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
  1734  
  1735  52
  1736  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
  1737  
  1738  I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
  1739  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
  1740  
  1741  The last scud of day holds back for me,
  1742  It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
  1743  It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
  1744  
  1745  I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
  1746  I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
  1747  
  1748  I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
  1749  If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
  1750  
  1751  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
  1752  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
  1753  And filter and fibre your blood.
  1754  
  1755  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
  1756  Missing me one place search another,
  1757  I stop somewhere waiting for you.