No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,No more modest than immodest.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 cur- rent and index.I speak…
Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,Say, old top-knot, what do you want?Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.Behold,…
comprehending,Thou, Washington, art all the world’s, the continents’ entire—not yours alone, America,Europe’s as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer’s cot,Or frozen North, or sultry South—the African’s—the Arab’s inhis tent,Old Asia’s there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;(Greets the antique the hero new? ‘tis but the same—the heirlegitimate, continued ever,The indomitable heart…
And with him horse and foot–and parks of artillery,And artillery-men, the deadliest that ever fired gun.
But I tell you you cannot be happy by others, any more than you canbeget or conceive a child by others.
joy?And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world–but soon I pass thegates,Now along the pond-side–now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,Now by the post-and-rail fences, where the old stones thrown there,pick’d from the fields, have accumulated,(Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones,…
not learn’d the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality;You have not seen that only such as they are for These States,And that what is less than they, must sooner or later lift off fromThese States.
Bringing to practical, vulgar tests, of all my ideal dreams,And of me, as lover and hero.
tell you what to say of me;Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderestlover,The friend, the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend, his lover, wasfondest,Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of lovewithin him–and freely pour’d it forth,Who often walk’d lonesome walks, thinking of his…
Is it for some burial place, vast and dry?Is it to wet the soil of graves?
