Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon’s edge, Searched with Apollo’s privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so. ESSAY I The Poet (1844) Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid 1 ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time. The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or 2 appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart. For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent. The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer’s words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon’s victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect. For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become 3 the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words. The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary. For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society 4 seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome, — what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time. All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, allfeeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble 5 down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be. But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet’s fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpenter’s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. “Things more excellent than every image,” says Jamblichus, “are expressed through images.” Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches: — “So every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight, With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For, of the soul, the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make.” Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety. The Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. “The mighty heaven,” said Proclus, “exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; 6 being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures.” Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active. No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites. The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics! 7 Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey’s Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances. For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — reattaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive, or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how 8 many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain’s weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are alike. The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named, — yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought. 9 By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain selfregulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus: Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet’s soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous 10 flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time. So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountainridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in precantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind’s faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature? 11 This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, — him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that. It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in 12 which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not ‘Devil’s wine,’ but God’s wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods. If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now 13 consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained; — or, when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; or, figure to be a bound of solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman, following him, writes, — “So in our tree of man, whose nervie root Springs in his top;” when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as “that white flower which marks extreme old age;” when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of ‘Gentilesse,’ compares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; — we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say, “it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die.” The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, “Those who are free throughout the world.” They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, 14 Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence. There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, — you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene. This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism 15 consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of these village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language. Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see. There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer, an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children, who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires, whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the 16 transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it. I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical. But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art. Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one 17 desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, “By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me.” He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say, ‘That is yours, this is mine;’ but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word. Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing. 18 O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. 19 “Song of Myself” By Walt Whitman (1855) 1 I CELEBRATE myself; And what I assume you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my Soul; I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. 5 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes; I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it; The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless; It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it; I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked; I am mad for it to be in contact with me. 10 2 The smoke of my own breath; Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine; My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs; The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn; The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind; A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms; The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag; The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides; The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. 15 20 Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems; You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;) 25 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 1 of 44 You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books; You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me: You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. 3 30 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. 35 Urge, and urge, and urge; Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always substance and increase, always sex; Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail—learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. 40 Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery, here we stand. Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my Soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen, and receives proof in its turn. 45 Showing the best, and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age; Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean; Not an inch, nor a particle of an inch, is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. 50 I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing: As the hugging and loving Bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day, with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels, swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization, and scream at my eyes, Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 2 of 44 That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me a cent, Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead? 55 4 Trippers and askers surround me; People I meet—the effect upon me of my early life, or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks, or of myself, or ill-doing, or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations; Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights, and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am; Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary; Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head, curious what will come next; Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it. 60 65 70 Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders; I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait. 5 I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you; And you must not be abased to the other. 75 Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning; How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn’d over upon me, 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. 80 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, Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 3 of 44 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 of the creation is love; And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields; And brown ants in the little wells beneath them; And mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heap’d stones, elder, mullen and poke-weed. 85 90 6 A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say,Whose? 95 Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic; And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white; Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. 100 And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you, curling grass; It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men; It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps; And here you are the mothers’ laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers; Darker than the colorless beards of old men; Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. 105 110 O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 4 of 44 What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. 115 120 All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. 7 Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots; 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.) Every kind for itself and its own—for me mine, male and female; For me those that have been boys, and that love women; For me the man that is proud, and feels how it stings to be slighted; For me the sweet-heart and the old maid—for me mothers, and the mothers of mothers; For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears; For me children, and the begetters of children. 125 130 135 Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded; I see through the broadcloth and gingham, whether or no; And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away. 8 140 The little one sleeps in its cradle; I lift the gauze, and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill; I peeringly view them from the top. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 5 of 44 The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bed-room; I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair—I note where the pistol has fallen. The blab of the pave, the tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders; The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor; The snow-sleighs, the clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs; The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs; The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside, borne to the hospital; The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall; The excited crowd, the policeman with his star, quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd; The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes; What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sun-struck, or in fits; What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes; What living and buried speech is always vibrating here—what howls restrain’d by decorum; Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips; I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come, and I depart. 145 150 155 9 The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready; The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon; The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged; The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow. I am there—I help—I came stretch’d atop of the load; I felt its soft jolts—one leg reclined on the other; I jump from the cross-beams, and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair full of wisps. 160 165 10 Alone, far in the wilds and mountains, I hunt, Wandering, amazed at my own lightness and glee; In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night, Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game; Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves, with my dog and gun by my side. 170 The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails—she cuts the sparkle and scud; My eyes settle the land—I bend at her prow, or shout joyously from the deck. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 6 of 44 The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me; I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots, and went and had a good time: (You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.) I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west—the bride was a red girl; Her father and his friends sat near, cross-legged and dumbly smoking—they had moccasins to their feet, and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders; On a bank lounged the trapper—he was drest mostly in skins—his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck—he held his bride by the hand; She had long eyelashes—her head was bare—her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet. The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside; I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile; Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, And brought water, and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north; (I had him sit next me at table—my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.) 175 180 185 190 11 Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore; Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly: Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank; She hides, handsome and richly drest, aft the blinds of the window. 195 Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you; You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather; The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. 200 The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair: Little streams pass’d all over their bodies. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 7 of 44 An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies; It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. 205 The young men float on their backs—their white bellies bulge to the sun—they do not ask who seizes fast to them; They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch; They do not think whom they souse with spray. 12 The butcher-boy puts off his killing clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market; I loiter, enjoying his repartee, and his shuffle and break-down. 210 Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil; Each has his main-sledge—they are all out—(there is a great heat in the fire.) From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements; The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms; Over-hand the hammers swing—over-hand so slow—over-hand so sure: They do not hasten—each man hits in his place. 215 13 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses—the block swags underneath on its tiedover chain; The negro that drives the dray of the stone-yard—steady and tall he stands, pois’d on one leg on the string-piece; His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens over his hip-band; His glance is calm and commanding—he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead; The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache—falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs. 220 I behold the picturesque giant, and love him—and I do not stop there; I go with the team also. In me the caresser of life wherever moving—backward as well as forward slueing; To niches aside and junior bending. 225 Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain, or halt in the leafy shade! what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck, on my distant and day-long ramble; Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 8 of 44 They rise together—they slowly circle around. I believe in those wing’d purposes, And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me, And consider green and violet, and the tufted crown, intentional; And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else; And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me; And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me. 230 235 14 The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night; Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation; (The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close; I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.) The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairiedog, The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, The brood of the turkey-hen, and she with her half-spread wings; I see in them and myself the same old law. The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections; They scorn the best I can do to relate them. 240 245 I am enamour’d of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses; I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me; Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns; Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me; Not asking the sky to come down to my good will; Scattering it freely forever. 15 250 255 The pure contralto sings in the organ loft; The carpenter dresses his plank—the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp; The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner; The pilot seizes the king-pin—he heaves down with a strong arm; The mate stands braced in the whale-boat—lance and harpoon are ready; Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 9 of 44 The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches; The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar; The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel; The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First-day loafe, and looks at the oats and rye; The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirm’d case, (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;) The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand—the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove; The machinist rolls up his sleeves—the policeman travels his beat—the gate-keeper marks who pass; The young fellow drives the express-wagon—(I love him, though I do not know him;) The half-breed straps on his light boots to complete in the race; The western turkey-shooting draws old and young—some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee; As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle; The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other; The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret, and harks to the musical rain; The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron; The squaw, wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth, is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale; The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways; As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat, the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers; The young sister holds out the skein, while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots; The one-year wife is recovering and happy, having a week ago borne her first child; The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine, or in the factory or mill; The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing; The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer—the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book—the sign-painter is lettering with red and gold; The canal boy trots on the tow-path—the book-keeper counts at his desk—the shoemaker waxes his thread; The conductor beats time for the band, and all the performers follow him; The child is baptized—the convert is making his first professions; The regatta is spread on the bay—the race is begun—how the white sails sparkle! The drover, watching his drove, sings out to them that would stray; The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;) The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype; The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly; 260 265 270 275 280 285 290 295 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 10 of 44 The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips; The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck; The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other; (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths, nor jeer you;) The President, holding a cabinet council, is surrounded by the Great Secretaries; On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms; The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold; The Missourian crosses the plains, toting his wares and his cattle; As the fare-collector goes through the train, he gives notice by the jingling of loose change; The floor-men are laying the floor—the tinners are tinning the roof—the masons are calling for mortar; In single file, each shouldering his hod, pass onward the laborers; Seasons pursuing each other, the indescribable crowd is gather’d—it is the Fourth of Seventh-month—(What salutes of cannon and small arms!) Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground; Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface; The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe; Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cottonwood or pekan-trees; Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river, or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansaw; Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahoochee or Altamahaw; Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them; In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport; The city sleeps, and the country sleeps; The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time; The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them; And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am. 300 305 310 315 320 16 I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise; Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine; One of the Great Nation, the nation of many nations, the smallest the same, and the largest the same; A southerner soon as a northerner—a planter nonchalant and hospitable, down by the Oconee I live; A Yankee, bound by my own way, ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth, and the sternest joints on earth; A Kentuckian, walking the vale of the Elkhorn, in my deer-skin leggings—a Louisianian orGeorgian; 325 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 11 of 44 A boatman over lakes or bays, or along coasts—a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; At home on Kanadian snow-shoes, or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland; At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking; At home on the hills of Vermont, or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch; Comrade of Californians—comrade of free north-westerners, (loving their big proportions;) Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen—comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat; A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest; A novice beginning, yet experient of myriads of seasons; Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion; A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker; A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. 330 335 340 I resist anything better than my own diversity; I breathe the air, but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place. (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place; The suns I see, and the suns I cannot see, are in their place; The palpable is in its place, and the impalpable is in its place.) 345 17 These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands—they are not original with me; If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing; If they are not the riddle, and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing; If they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing. 350 This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is; This is the common air that bathes the globe. 18 With music strong I come—with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only—I play great marches for conquer’d and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall—battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. 355 I beat and pound for the dead; I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail’d! Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 12 of 44 And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements! and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes, equal to the greatest heroes known. 360 19 This is the meal equally set—this is the meat for natural hunger; It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous—I make appointments with all; I will not have a single person slighted or left away; The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited; The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited—the venerealee is invited: There shall be no difference between them and the rest. This is the press of a bashful hand—this is the float and odor of hair; This is the touch of my lips to yours—this is the murmur of yearning; This is the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face; This is the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again. Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well, I have—for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has. 365 370 375 Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? Does the early redstart, twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they? This hour I tell things in confidence; I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. 380 20 Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? What is a man, anyhow? What am I? What are you? All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own; Else it were time lost listening to me. 385 I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums, and the ground but wallow and filth; That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape, and tears. Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids—conformity goes to the fourthSource URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 13 of 44 remov’d; I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out. 390 Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious? Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsell’d with doctors, and calculated close, I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. In all people I see myself—none more, and not one a barleycorn less; And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them. 395 And I know I am solid and sound; To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow; All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. I know I am deathless; I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass; I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night. I know I am august; I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood; I see that the elementary laws never apologize; (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.) 400 405 I exist as I am—that is enough; If no other in the world be aware, I sit content; And if each and all be aware, I sit content. One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself; And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. 410 My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite; I laugh at what you call dissolution; And I know the amplitude of time. 21 415 I am the poet of the Body; And I am the poet of the Soul. The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me; The first I graft and increase upon myself—the latter I translate into a new tongue. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 14 of 44 I am the poet of the woman the same as the man; And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man; And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. 420 I chant the chant of dilation or pride; We have had ducking and deprecating about enough; I show that size is only development. Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President? It is a trifle—they will more than arrive there, every one, and still pass on. 425 I am he that walks with the tender and growing night; I call to the earth and sea, half-held by the night. Press close, bare-bosom’d night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing night! Night of south winds! night of the large few stars! Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night. Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath’d earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees; Earth of departed sunset! earth of the mountains, misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow’d earth! rich, apple-blossom’d earth! Smile, for your lover comes! Prodigal, you have given me love! Therefore I to you give love! O unspeakable, passionate love! 430 435 440 22 You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean; I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers; I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me; We must have a turn together—I undress—hurry me out of sight of the land; Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse; Dash me with amorous wet—I can repay you. Sea of stretch’d ground-swells! Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves! Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea! 445 450 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 15 of 44 I am integral with you—I too am of one phase, and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux I—extoller of hate and conciliation; Extoller of amies, and those that sleep in each others’ arms. I am he attesting sympathy; (Shall I make my list of things in the house, and skip the house that supports them?) 455 I am not the poet of goodness only—I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. Washes and razors for foofoos—for me freckles and a bristling beard. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me—I stand indifferent; My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait; I moisten the roots of all that has grown. 460 Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy? Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified? I find one side a balance, and the antipodal side a balance; Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine; Thoughts and deeds of the present, our rouse and early start. 465 This minute that comes to me over the past decillions, There is no better than it and now. What behaved well in the past, or behaves well to-day, is not such a wonder; The wonder is, always and always, how there can be a mean man or an infidel. 470 23 Endless unfolding of words of ages! And mine a word of the modern—the word En-Masse. A word of the faith that never balks; Here or henceforward, it is all the same to me—I accept Time, absolutely. 475 It alone is without flaw—it rounds and completes all; That mystic, baffling wonder I love, alone completes all. I accept reality, and dare not question it; Materialism first and last imbuing. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 16 of 44 Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration! Fetch stonecrop, mixt with cedar and branches of lilac; This is the lexicographer—this the chemist—this made a grammar of the old cartouches; These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas; This is the geologist—this works with the scalpel—and this is a mathematician. 480 Gentlemen! to you the first honors always: Your facts are useful and real—and yet they are not my dwelling; (I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.) 485 Less the reminders of properties told, my words; And more the reminders, they, of life untold, and of freedom and extrication, And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt, And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives, and them that plot and conspire. 490 24 Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding; No sentimentalist—no stander above men and women, or apart from them; No more modest than immodest. 495 Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me; And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging—through me the current and index. 500 I speak the pass-word primeval—I give the sign of democracy; By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. Through me many long dumb voices; Voices of the interminable generations of slaves; Voices of prostitutes, and of deform’d persons; Voices of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs; Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the father-stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon; Of the trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. 505 510 Through me forbidden voices; Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 17 of 44 Voice of sexes and lusts—voices veil’d, and I remove the veil; Voices indecent, by me clarified and transfigur’d. 515 I do not press my fingers across my mouth; I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart; Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. I believe in the flesh and the appetites; Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from; The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer; This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. 520 If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part ofit. Translucent mould of me, it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests, it shall be you! Firm masculine colter, it shall be you. 525 Whatever goes to the tilth of me, it shall be you! You my rich blood! Your milky stream, pale strippings of my life. Breast that presses against other breasts, it shall be you! My brain, it shall be your occult convolutions. 530 Root of wash’d sweet flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple! fibre of manly wheat! it shall be you! Sun so generous, it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face, it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews, it shall be you! Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me, it shall be you! Broad, muscular fields! branches of live oak! loving lounger in my winding paths! it shall be you! Hands I have taken—face I have kiss’d—mortal I have ever touch’d! it shall be you. I dote on myself—there is that lot of me, and all so luscious; Each moment, and whatever happens, thrills me with joy. 535 540 O I am wonderful! Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 18 of 44 I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish; Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again. That I walk up my stoop! I pause to consider if it really be; A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. 545 To behold the day-break! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows; The air tastes good to my palate. Hefts of the moving world, at innocent gambols, silently rising, freshly exuding, Scooting obliquely high and low. 550 Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs; Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven. The earth by the sky staid with—the daily close of their junction; The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head; The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master! 555 25 Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me. We also ascend, dazzling and tremendous as the sun; We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak. 560 My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach; With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds, and volumes of worlds. Speech is the twin of my vision—it is unequal to measure itself; It provokes me forever; It says sarcastically, Walt, you contain enough—why don’t you let it out, then? 565 Come now, I will not be tantalized—you conceive too much of articulation. Do you not know, O speech, how the buds beneath you are folded? Waiting in gloom, protected by frost; The dirt receding before my prophetical screams; I underlying causes, to balance them at last; My knowledge my live parts—it keeping tally with the meaning of things, HAPPINESS—which, whoever hears me, let him or her set out in search of this day. 570 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 19 of 44 My final merit I refuse you—I refuse putting from me what I really am; Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me; I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. 575 Writing and talk do not prove me; I carry the plenum of proof, and everything else, in my face; With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic. 26 I think I will do nothing now but listen, To accrue what I hear into myself—to let sounds contribute toward me. 580 I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals; I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice; I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following; Sounds of the city, and sounds out of the city—sounds of the day and night; Talkative young ones to those that like them—the loud laugh of work-people at their meals; The angry base of disjointed friendship—the faint tones of the sick; The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence; The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves—the refrain of the anchorlifters; The ring of alarm-bells—the cry of fire—the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts, with premonitory tinkles, and color’d lights; The steam-whistle—the solid roll of the train of approaching cars; The slow-march play’d at the head of the association, marching two and two, (They go to guard some corpse—the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) I hear the violoncello (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint;) I hear the key’d cornet—it glides quickly in through my ears; It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. 585 590 595 I hear the chorus—it is a grand opera; Ah, this indeed is music! This suits me. A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me; The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full. I hear the train’d soprano—(what work, with hers, is this?) The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies; It wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possess’d them; It sails me—I dab with bare feet—they are lick’d by the indolent waves; 600 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 20 of 44 I am exposed, cut by bitter and angry hail—I lose my breath, Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death; At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, And that we call BEING. 605 27 To be, in any form—what is that? (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither;) If nothing lay more develop’d, the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. 610 Mine is no callous shell; I have instant conductors all over me, whether I pass or stop; They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy; To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand. 615 28 Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity, Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself; On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs, Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, Depriving me of my best, as for a purpose, Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields, Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me; No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger; Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while, Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me. 620 625 630 The sentries desert every other part of me; They have left me helpless to a red marauder; They all come to the headland, to witness and assist against me. I am given up by traitors; I talk wildly—I have lost my wits—I and nobody else am the greatest traitor; I went myself first to the headland—my own hands carried me there. 635 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 21 of 44 You villian touch! what are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat; Unclench your floodgates! you are too much for me. 29 Blind, loving, wrestling touch! sheath’d, hooded, sharp-tooth’d touch! Did it make you ache so, leaving me? 640 Parting, track’d by arriving—perpetual payment of perpetual loan; Rich, showering rain, and recompense richer afterward. Sprouts take and accumulate—stand by the curb prolific and vital: Landscapes, projected, masculine, full-sized and golden. 645 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?) 650 Logic and sermons never convince; The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so; Only what nobody denies is so. A minute and a drop of me settle my brain; I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps, And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman, And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other, And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific, And until every one shall delight us, and we them. 655 660 31 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels, And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl boiling her iron tea- 665 Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/courses/engl405/ This work is in the public domain. Saylor.org Page 22 of 44 kettle and baking shortcake. I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, And call anything close again, when I desire it. In vain the speeding or shyness; In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach; In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones; In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes; In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters lying low; In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky; In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs; In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods; In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador; I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. 670 675 680 32 I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d; I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago; Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me, and I accept them; They bring me tokens of myself—they evince them plainly in their possession. 685 690 I wonder where they get those tokens: Did I pass that way huge times ago, and negligently drop them? Myself moving forward then and now and forever, Gathering and showing more always and with velocity, Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them; Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers; Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms. 695 A gigantic beauty of a stallion, f...
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