Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,

Sparkles from the wheel.

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Is reform needed? is it through you?

The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you need

to accomplish it.

You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood,

complexion, clean and sweet?

Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and soul that

when you enter the crowd an atmosphere of desire and command

enters with you, and every one is impress’d with your Personality?

O the magnet! the flesh over and over!

Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to

inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,

elevatedness,

Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

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Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded, and is

always to come unfolded,

Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to come the

superbest man of the earth,

Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest man,

Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be

form’d of perfect body,

Unfolded only out of the inimitable poems of woman can come the

poems of man, (only thence have my poems come;)

Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only thence

can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,

Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman

love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man,

Unfolded out of the folds of the woman’s brain come all the folds

of the man’s brain, duly obedient,

Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded,

Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;

A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity, but

every of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman;

First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.

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What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own

name? repeating it over and over;

I stand apart to hear — it never tires me.

To you your name also;

Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in

the sound of your name?

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Who includes diversity and is Nature,

Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of

the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,

Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing,

or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,

Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover,

Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,

spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual,

Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good,

Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body

understands by subtle analogies all other theories,

The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;

Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in

other globes with their suns and moons,

Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day

but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,

The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

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Others may praise what they like;

But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing in art

or aught else,

Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river, also the

western prairie-scent,

And exudes it all again.

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Who learns my lesson complete?

Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist,

The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and offspring, merchant,

clerk, porter and customer,

Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy — draw nigh and commence;

It is no lesson — it lets down the bars to a good lesson,

And that to another, and every one to another still.

The great laws take and effuse without argument,

I am of the same style, for I am their friend,

I love them quits and quits, I do not halt and make salaams.

I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and the reasons

of things,

They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.

I cannot say to any person what I hear — I cannot say it to myself —

it is very wonderful.

It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe moving so

exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt or

the untruth of a single second,

I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years,

nor ten billions of years,

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

and builds a house.

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

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

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

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

I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and

how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful,

And pass’d from a babe in the creeping trance of a couple of

summers and winters to articulate and walk — all this is

equally wonderful.

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

without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see

each other, is every bit as wonderful.

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

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

be true, is just as wonderful.

And that the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth, is

equally wonderful,

And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally

wonderful.

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All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable to

analysis in the soul,

Not traditions, not the outer authorities are the judges,

They are the judges of outer authorities and of all traditions,

They corroborate as they go only whatever corroborates themselves,

and touches themselves;

For all that, they have it forever in themselves to corroborate far

and near without one exception.

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On my Northwest coast in the midst of the night a fishermen’s group

stands watching,

Out on the lake that expands before them, others are spearing salmon,

The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water,

Bearing a torch ablaze at the prow.

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O star of France,

The brightness of thy hope and strength and fame,

Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long,

Beseems to-day a wreck driven by the gale, a mastless hulk,

And ‘mid its teeming madden’d half-drown’d crowds,

Nor helm nor helmsman.

Dim smitten star,

Orb not of France alone, pale symbol of my soul, its dearest hopes,

The struggle and the daring, rage divine for liberty,

Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast’s dreams of brotherhood,