Leaves of Grass: First and Death-Bed Editions

by Walt Whitman

  I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any sooner than

  another!

  O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this hour with

  irrepressible love,

  Walking New England, a friend, a traveler,

  Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on

  Paumanok’s sands,

  Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwelling in

  every town,

  Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,

  Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls,

  Of and through the States as during life, each man and woman

  my neighbor,

  The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to

  him and her,

  The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet with any

  of them,

  Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my house of

  adobie,

  Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in Maryland,

  Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and ice

  welcome to me,

  Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the

  Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,

  Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every

  new brother,

  Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they

  unite with the old ones,

  Coming among the new ones myself to be their companion and

  equal, coming personally to you now,

  Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

  —15—

  With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on.

  For your life adhere to me,

  (I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give

  myself really to you, but what of that?

  Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

  No dainty dolce affettuosoak I,

  Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck‘d, forbidding, I have arrived,

  To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,

  For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

  —16—

  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.

  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.

  -17-

  Expanding and swift, 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, with new

  contests,

  New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

  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.

  —18—

  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 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 Kaw, countless herds of buffalo

  feeding on short curly grass,

  See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with

  iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,

  See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press-see, the electric

  telegraph stretching across the continent,

  See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe

  reaching, pulses of Europe duly return‘d,

  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,

  drest in working dresses,

  See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me

  well-belov’d, close-held by day and night,

  Hear the loud echoes of my songs there—read the hints come

  at last.

  —19—

  O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.7

  O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!

  O something ecstatic 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 to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.

  SONG OF MYSELF8

  —1—

  I celebrate myself, and sing 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.

  My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this

  air,

  Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their

  parents the same,

  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

  Hoping to cease not till death.

  Creeds and schools in abeyance,

  Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never

  forgotten,

  I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

  Nature without check with original energy.

  —2—

  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.

  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 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.

  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,)

  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 your self.

  —3—

  I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the

  beginning and the end,

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

  There was never any more inception than there is now,

  Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

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

  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

  Urge and urge and urge,

  Always the procreant urge of the world.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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,

  That they turn from gazing after and down the road,

  And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,

  Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and

  which is ahead?

  -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.

  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.

  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.

  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that

  pass all the argument of the earth,

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

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

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

  women my sisters and lovers,

  And that a kelson 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, heap’d stones, elder, mullein

  and poke-weed.

  -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?

  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.

  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, or 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.

  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.

/>   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.

  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.

  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—

  The little one sleeps in its cradle,

  I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies

  with my hand.