Leaves of Grass

Intro

• From a Whitman essay about poetry (Democratic Vistas?): “Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work.”

Beginning My Studies

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

• The purity of youth and learning, the revelation of the world through sense. Then the stopping and loitering in them, not wishing to go any further (for you’re here!), yet that leading to ecstasy—a stepping beyond!

Shut Not Your Doors

…

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

• The words—logos, doing, the drift—mythos, being
• Not felt by the intellect, but intuition
• The drift’s melody, its latent message, passes through book entire

Starting from Paumanak

…

This then is life,
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions
…
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems;
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my Soul, and of immortality.
…
And a song make I, of the One form’d out of all;
The fang’d and glittering One whose head is over all;
Resolute, warlike One, including and over all;
(However high the head of any else, that head is over all.)
…
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough;
None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough;
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.
…
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great;
But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide;
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands, sweeps and provides for all.
…
O such themes—equalities! O divine average!
Warblings under the sun, usher’d as now, or at noon, or setting,
Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither,
I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and cheerfully pass them forward.
…
Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.
…
Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!
…
With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on.
For your life adhere to me,
(I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself really to you, but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)
No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

Song of Myself

…

[3]

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

…

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

• The soul unseen is proven by the material realm we do see, the body. But when the body perishes, becomes unseen, so it is proven by the seen via its lack… hmm… seen and unseen still both exist, and exist through each other, so with life and death…

…

[4]

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,

I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

…

[5]

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson [backbone] of the creation is love

…

[7]

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,

And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,

The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,

I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,

(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

…

[15]

[vast description of the various people he’s observed and compassioned]

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be there more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

…

[17]

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

This the common air that bathes the globe.

…

[18]

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?

I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

I beat and pound for the dead,

I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.

• Rejoicing for those lost and forgotten, for they possessed the same spirit, they were also leaves of grass

…

[19]

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,

It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,

…

This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,

…

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

• The table is set for all, but not all realize it. Those who years for the One realize it, and found themselves in this poem. Those who listen.

…

[22]

I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

…

[23]

Gentlemen [scientists], to you the first honors always!

Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,

I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

…

[25]

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

…

Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?

Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,

• The inarticulatable giving rise to the articulate.

…

[30]

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

The insignificant is as big to me as any,

(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

…

And a summit and flower there is the feeling [man and woman] have for each other,

And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,

And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

• The omnific love of all things is the eventual

…

[33]

I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,

My course runs below the soundings of plummets.

…

[40]

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,

When I give I give myself.

…

I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,

And any thing I have I bestow.

I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,

You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

…

[42]

Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life

…

I know perfectly well my own egotism,

Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,

And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

Not words of routine this song of mine,

But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;

This printed and bound book—but the printer and the printing-office boy?

The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?

The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets—but the pluck of the captain and engineers?

In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?

The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way?

The saints and sages in history—but you yourself?

Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain,

And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?

• Presence over represents

…

[43]

The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,

And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,

But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

…

[44]

It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.

What is known I strip away,

I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?

…

[46]

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

…

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

…

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,

I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

…

[48]

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

…

[50]

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.

Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes,

I sleep—I sleep long.

I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

…

[52]

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

• Grass as God, the Soul, the Brahma, Tao, though these are more general… the leaves are multitudinous particularity, individuality

Children of Adam

I sing the body electric

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

…

A woman waits for me

…

I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable—but I love you,

I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,

…

Spontaneous me

…

And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,

It has done its work—I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.

I am he that aches with love

I AM he that aches with amorous love;

Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?

So the body of me to all I meet or know.

• Neoplatonic, reminds of Gabirol

Calamus

Sometimes with one I love

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another

(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,

Yet out of that I have written these songs).

Salut au Monde!

…

Each of us inevitable,

Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth,

Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,

Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

Song of the Open Road

…

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.

• Indoor complaints—the ruminating mind. Ask not good-fortune but realize it is always there. Shut off the separating def and blend with reality: the open road.

[6]

…

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

…

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

…

[10]

…

(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,

We convince by our presence.)

…

[13]

…

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

All parts away for the progress of souls,

All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

…

[14]

…

Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

…

[15]

…

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

…

[2]

…

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme.

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings…

…

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

• Establishing the interconnected fabric, multiplicity among unity, the miraculousness of every node

…

[3]

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

…

Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,

• The grace of unity ensures that time and distance avail not—apparents rather than actuals.

…

[5]

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

…

[6]

…

Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

…

[7]

Closer yet I approach you,

What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,

I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

…

[8]

…

What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach?

What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?

Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

• The subtle connections. Unnameable, yet evident. ‘Nighest name’: God, Brahman, Dao. We give it the nearest name we can find.

We understand then do we not?

What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?

What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?

• The unspoken undercurrent that the ferry sails across; our talk about it separates us from it; the being with.

[9]

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!

…

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;

…

Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!

…

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,

You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,

About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung out divinest aromas,

…

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,

We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

• The particulars, dumb and patiently waiting, we use the particulars to approach the universal. We fathom neither the universal nor the particular within which it sprouts (we love you—there is perfection in you also). Parts furnished to eternity—to the soul (the universal part?)

Song of the Answerer

[1]

…

He is the Answerer,

What can be answer’d he answers, and what cannot be answer’d he shows how it cannot be answer’d.

…

He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man translates himself also,

One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees how they join.

…

[2]

…

Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts,

…

The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets,

…

The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers and fathers,

The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

• The words of true poems are from the Answerer, who also answers the questions of science

The words of the true poems give you more than poems,

They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else,

…

They do not seek beauty, they are sought,

Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.

They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,

They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,

Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.

• The Answerer always leaves some unanswered, open, interminable, and we who launch into the interminable. Never be quiet again—always question!

A Song of Joys

…

O the joy of my soul leaning pois’d on itself, receiving identity through materials and loving them, observing characters and absorbing them,

My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch, reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like,

The real life of my senses and flesh transcending my senses and flesh,

My body done with materials, my sight done with my material eyes,

Proved to me this day beyond avail that it is not my material eyes which finally see,

Nor my material body which finally loves, walks, laughs, shouts, embraces, procreates.

…

O to attract by more than attraction!

How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest,

It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws.

…

Song of the Broad-Axe

“And the dead advance as much as the living advance, / … And nothing endures but personal qualities.”

• Big theme for of the spirit of people, rather than cities, monuments, and so on. It is great people who are memorable, and those monuments fall downstream of, but are unnecessary. The spirit, the personality, is what is necessary.

…

“(America! I do not vaunt my love for you,

I have what I have.)”

Song of the Redwood Tree

…

(For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,

And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth)

• Says the dying Redwood tree

A Song for Occupations

…

We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine,

I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,

It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,

Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than

they are shed out of you.

…

List close my scholars dear,

Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,

Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are

The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,

If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?

The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums.

…

I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,

It is always to leave the best untold.

When I undertake to tell the best I find I cannot,

My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots,

My breath will not be obedient to its organs,

I become a dumb man.

…

I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best,

I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.

Birds of Passage

…

From imperfection’s murkiest cloud,

Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,

One flash of heaven’s glory.

…

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,

From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light,

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light

From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever

…

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

O Me! O Life!

…

That you are here— that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

As I Lay With My Head in Your Lap, Camerado

…

I heed not, and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, or ridicule;

And the threat of what is called hell is little or nothing to me;

And the lure of what is called heaven is little or nothing to me;

Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,

Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quelled and defeated.

• Motivated not by reward, by destination, but by pure procession, procession for the sake of procession with no end in sight! Open! I answer that I cannot answer.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

[1]

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

…

[3]

…

In the dooryard fronting…

Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing…

…

With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig with its flower I break.

…

[4]

…

Song of the bleeding throat,

Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,

If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

…

[6]

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac.

[7]

(Nor for you, for one alone,

Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,

For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

All over bouquets of roses,

O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,

But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,

Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,

With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,

For you and the coffins all of you O death.)

…

[9]

…

The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.

…

[11]

…

With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,

With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,

In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,

…

[13]

…

Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,

Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid and free and tender!

O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!

You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)

Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.

…

[14]

…

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,

And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

…

Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,

Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

…

[16]

…

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

By Blue Ontario’s Shore

…

To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no account;

That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle, as the hold of the limbs of the body, or the fibres of plants.

Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest;

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

…

He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing;

As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith,

His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,

In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,

He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,

He sees eternity in men and women—he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.

…

As Consequent, Etc.

…

In you whoe’er you are my book perusing,

In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,

All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

Vocalism

…

O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?

Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow,

As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere around the globe.

…

You Felons on Trial in Courts

…

Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,

I walk with delinquents with passionate love,

I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself,

And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?

To a Common Prostitute

Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lust as Nature,

Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,

Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

…

**

Who Learns My Lesson Complete?

…

I cannot say to any person what I hear—I cannot say it to myself—it is very wonderful.

…

I do not think [the globe] was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years,

        nor ten billions of years,

Nor plann’d and built one thing after another, as an architect plans

        and builds a house.

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,

Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,

Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal;

I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful;

…

And that my Soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other

        without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each

        other, is every bit as wonderful.

And that I can think such thoughts as these, is just as wonderful;

And that I can remind you, and you think them, and know them to be

        true, is just as wonderful.

Passage to India

…

Ah more than any priest O soul we too believe in God,  

But with the mystery of God we dare not dally.  

…

Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over,   

Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,  

I and my soul to range in range of thee.  

O Thou transcendant,

Nameless, the fibre and the breath,   

Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,   

Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,   

Thou moral, spiritual fountain— affection’s source— thou reservoir,

…

Greater than stars or suns,  

Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;  

What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?

What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours, O soul?  

What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?   

What cheerful willingness for others’ sake, to give up all?  

For others’ sake to suffer all?

Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,

The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,  

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,  

As fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,   

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

…

Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!  

Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!  

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?  

Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?   

Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?   

Sail forth— steer for the deep waters only,   

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,  

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.  

O my brave soul!  

O farther farther sail!  

O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

O farther, farther, farther sail!

Prayer of Columbus

…

I am too full of woe!

Haply I may not live another day;

I can not rest, O God—I can not eat or drink or sleep,

Till I put forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee,

Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee—commune with Thee,

Report myself once more to Thee.

…

The end I know not—it is all in Thee;

Or small, or great, I know not—haply, what broad fields, what lands;

Haply, the brutish, measureless, human undergrowth I know,

Transplanted there, may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee;

Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping tools;

Haply the lifeless cross I know—Europe’s dead cross—may bud and blossom there.

One effort more—my altar this bleak sand:

That Thou, O God, my life hast lighted,

With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,

(Light rare, untellable—lighting the very light!

Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages!)

For that, O God—be it my latest word—here on my knees,

Old, poor, and paralyzed—I thank Thee.

…

The Sleepers

… [one of my favourites]

(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)

…

A show of the summer softness—a contact of something unseen—an amour of the light and air, 
I am jealous and overwhelm’d with friendliness, 
And will go gallivant with the light and air myself.

O love and summer, you are in the dreams and in me,

…

I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other, 
The night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them.

I swear they are all beautiful, 
Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is beautiful, 
The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

Peace is always beautiful, 
The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.

The myth of heaven indicates the soul, 
The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it comes or it lags behind, 
It comes from its embower’d garden and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world,

…

The soul is always beautiful, 
The universe is duly in order, every thing is in its place, 
What has arrived is in its place and what waits shall be in its place, 
…
The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite—they unite now.

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,

They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed,

…

I too pass from the night, 
I stay a while away O night, but I return to you again and love you.

Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? 
I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you, 
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long, 
I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you, but I know I came well and shall go well.

So Long!

…

Camerado, this is no book,

Who touches this touches a man,

(Is it night? are we here together alone?)

It is I you hold and who holds you,

I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.

O how your fingers drowse me,

Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears,

I feel immerged from head to foot;

Delicious, enough.

…

Had I the Choice

Had I the choice to tally greatest bards,

…

These, these, O sea, all these I’d gladly barter,

Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer,

Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse,

And leave its odor there.

Continuities

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

• Continuities… the world is utterly continuous. For something to be lost is to assume a discontinuity, a schism, a break. But the world is not broken, the world is ceaselessly creative, nothing is lost.
• This too means life is not lost, this too means death is not lost, they are one, life in death, life everlasting, death everlasting.
• Death through life, life through death. I now see, this flaming soul cannot be destroyed, cannot stop burning, it is conserved.

**

WHEN THE FULL-GROWN POET CAME.

**

WHEN the full-grown poet came,

Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;

But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;

—Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took  

 each by the hand;

And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,

Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,

And wholly and joyously blends them.

Democratic Vistas

“…a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote-and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?”

“Never was anything more wanted than,

today, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway’d the most, and whence it sways others, is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. … Why tower, in reminiscence, above all the nations of the earth, two special lands, petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic, beautiful, columnar? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal lives, in a couple of poems.”

“For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the genuine union, when we come to a mortal crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the written law, nor (as is generally supposed) either self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects-but the fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power.”

“And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. Not that half only, individualism, which isolates. There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties, and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all. Both are to be vitalized by religion (sole worthiest elevator of man or State), breathing into the proud, material tissues, the breath of life. For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there. Nor may the scheme step forth, clothed in resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the best, the latest fruit, the spiritual, shall fully appear.”

“There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity-yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth (significant only because of the Me in the center), creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.”

“I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight. Only here, communion with the mysteries, the eternal problems, whence? whither? Alone, and identity, and the mood—and the soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors. Alone, and silent thought and awe, and aspiration-and then the interior consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its wondrous lines to the sense. Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one’s isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable.”

“The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents. Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our stand, our ground, and never desert it, to confront the growing excess arrogance of realism.“

“That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And again lo! the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever—the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things-wherefrom I feel and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning—and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter.”