Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

58 No dainty dolce affettuoso I;
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

59 On my way a moment I pause,
Here for you! And here for America!
Still the Present I raise aloft—Still the Future of The States I harbinge, glad and sublime,
And for the Past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

60 The red aborigines!
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco.
Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,
Leaving such to The States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names.

61 O expanding and swift! O henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious,
A world primal again—Vistas of glory, incessant and branching,
A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far,
New politics—New literatures and religions—New inventions and arts.

62 These! These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more, but arise;
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

63 See! steamers steaming through my poems!
See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;
See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;
See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other side the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;
See, pastures and forests in my poems—See, animals, wild and tame—See, beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short curly grass;
See, in my poems, old and new cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, and ceaseless vehicles, and commerce;
See the populace, millions upon millions, handsome, tall, muscular, both sexes, clothed in easy and dignified clothes—teaching, commanding, marrying, generating, equally electing and elective;
See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press—See, the electric telegraph—See, the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle;
See, ploughmen, ploughing farms—See, miners, digging mines—See, the numberless factories;
See, mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools—See from among them, superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working dresses;
See, lounging through the shops and fields of The States, me, well-beloved, close-held by day and night,
Hear the loud echo of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.

64 O my comrade!
O you and me at last—and us two only;
O power, liberty, eternity at last!
O to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues!
O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common ground! O adhesiveness!
O the pensive aching to be together—you know not why, and I know not why.

65 O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!
O something extatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph—and you shall also;
O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover,
O haste, firm holding—haste, haste on, with me.

1 I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

2 I loafe and invite my Soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

3 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.

4 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.

5 The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzzed 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-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice, words loosed 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.

6 Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practised so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

7 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,
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.

8 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.

9 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.

10 Urge, and urge, and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

11 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.

12 To elaborate is no avail—learned and unlearned feel that it is so.

13 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.

14 Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my Soul.

15 Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen, and receives proof in its turn.

16 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.

17 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.

18 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,
And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels, swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization, and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?