{ "id": "walt-whitman/song-of-myself", "title": "Song of Myself", "poet": "Walt Whitman", "poet_slug": "walt-whitman", "language": "en", "book": "Leaves of Grass", "book_slug": "leaves-of-grass", "book_kind": "volume", "sequence": 26, "container": null, "epigraph": null, "first_published": { "year": 1855, "venue": "Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855), untitled", "note": "First of the twelve untitled poems of the first edition; reached its final title in 1881. This text follows the 1891–92 “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass.", "uncertain": false, "sources": [ "https://whitmanarchive.org/item/encyclopedia_entry52", "https://whitmanarchive.org/item/encyclopedia_entry21" ] }, "source": { "kind": "standard-ebooks", "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass", "file": "song-of-myself.xhtml", "upstream": [ "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322", "https://archive.org/details/leavesgrass03whitgoog" ], "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)" }, "verification": { "level": "structural-only", "last_checked": "2026-08-12" }, "stats": { "n_lines": 1346, "n_stanzas": 355, "n_parts": 52, "longest_line_chars": 161, "max_indent": 0 }, "site_ready": true, "parts": [ { "ordinal": "1", "title": null, "stanza_range": [ 0, 4 ] }, { "ordinal": "2", "title": null, "stanza_range": [ 4, 9 ] }, { "ordinal": "3", "title": null, "stanza_range": [ 9, 19 ] }, { "ordinal": "4", "title": null, "stanza_range": [ 19, 22 ] }, { 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"stanza_range": [ 336, 342 ] }, { "ordinal": "51", "title": null, "stanza_range": [ 342, 348 ] }, { "ordinal": "52", "title": null, "stanza_range": [ 348, 355 ] } ], "stanzas": [ [ { "text": "I celebrate myself, and sing myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And what I assume you shall assume,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I loafe and invite my soul,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Hoping to cease not till death.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Creeds and schools in abeyance,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nature without check with original energy.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am mad for it to be in contact with me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The smoke of my own breath,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "There was never any more inception than there is now,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor any more youth or age than there is now,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And will never be any more perfection than there is now,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Urge and urge and urge,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Always the procreant urge of the world.", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I and this mystery here we stand.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am satisfied⁠—I see, dance, laugh, sing;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That they turn from gazing after and down the road,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Trippers and askers surround me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "These come to me days and nights and go from me again,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But they are not the Me myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And you must not be abased to the other.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And that a kelson of the creation is love,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Growing among black folks as among white,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Tenderly will I use you curling grass,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And here you are the mothers’ laps.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Darker than the colorless beards of old men,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "What do you think has become of the young and old men?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And what do you think has become of the women and children?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "They are alive and well somewhere,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For me those that have been boys and that love women,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For me children and the begetters of children.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The little one sleeps in its cradle,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I peeringly view them from the top.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I mind them or the show or resonance of them⁠—I come and I depart.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Which of the young men does she like the best?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They do not think whom they souse with spray.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I go with the team also.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Absorbing all to myself and for this song.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They rise together, they slowly circle around.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I believe in those wing’d purposes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I see in them and myself the same old law.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They scorn the best I can do to relate them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am enamour’d of growing out-doors,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Scattering it freely forever.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What is removed drops horribly in a pail;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the musical rain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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 blue and gold,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The peddler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The city sleeps and the country sleeps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I resist any thing better than my own diversity,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And am not stuck up, and am in my place.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This the common air that bathes the globe.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I beat and pound for the dead,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Vivas to those who have fail’d!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And to those themselves who sank in the sea!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I will not have a single person slighted or left away,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "There shall be no difference between them and the rest.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Do you take it I would astonish?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Do I astonish more than they?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This hour I tell things in confidence,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Else it were time lost listening to me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not snivel that snivel the world over,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I know I am solid and sound,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I know I am deathless,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I know I am august,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I see that the elementary laws never apologize,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I exist as I am, that is enough,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If no other in the world be aware I sit content,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And if each and all be aware I sit content.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I laugh at what you call dissolution,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I know the amplitude of time.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I chant the chant of dilation or pride,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I show that size is only development.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Press close bare-bosom’d night⁠—press close magnetic nourishing night!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Night of south winds⁠—night of the large few stars!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Still nodding night⁠—mad naked summer night.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Earth of departed sunset⁠—earth of the mountains misty-topt!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Far-swooping elbow’d earth⁠—rich apple-blossom’d earth!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Smile, for your lover comes.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Prodigal, you have given me love⁠—therefore I to you give love!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "O unspeakable passionate love.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "You sea! I resign myself to you also⁠—I guess what you mean,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am he attesting sympathy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I moisten the roots of all that has grown.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "There is no better than it and now.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Endless unfolding of words of ages!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A word of the faith that never balks,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I accept Reality and dare not question it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Materialism first and last imbuing.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Less the reminders of properties told my words,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "No more modest than immodest.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Unscrew the locks from the doors!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Whoever degrades another degrades me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Through me many long dumb voices,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And of the rights of them the others are down upon,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Through me forbidden voices,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not press my fingers across my mouth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I believe in the flesh and the appetites,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Translucent mould of me it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Firm masculine colter it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Sun so generous it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "To behold the day-break!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The air tastes good to my palate.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising, freshly exuding,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Scooting obliquely high and low.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I underlying causes to balance them at last,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Writing and talk do not prove me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I carry the plenum of proof and everything else in my face,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Now I will do nothing but listen,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "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,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ah this indeed is music⁠—this suits me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And that we call Being.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "To be in any form, what is that?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Mine is no callous shell,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The sentries desert every other part of me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They have left me helpless to a red marauder,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am given up by traitors,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Did it make you ache so, leaving me?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "All truths wait in all things,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The insignificant is as big to me as any,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(What is less or more than a touch?)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Logic and sermons never convince,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Only what nobody denies is so.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But call anything back again when I desire it.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "In vain the speeding or shyness,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I stand and look at them long and long.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "They do not sweat and whine about their condition,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "So they show their relations to me and I accept them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I wonder where they get those tokens,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Myself moving forward then and now and forever,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am afoot with my vision.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "By the city’s quadrangular houses⁠—in log huts, camping with lumbermen,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Weeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav’d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the office or public hall;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with the new and old,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Far from the settlements studying the print of animals’ feet, or the moccasin print,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I tread day and night such roads.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And look at quintillions ripen’d and look at quintillions green.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My course runs below the soundings of plummets.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I help myself to material and immaterial,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I anchor my ship for a little while only,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I ascend to the foretruck,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drown’d.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I understand the large hearts of heroes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The courage of present times and all times,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How he follow’d with them and tack’d with them three days and would not give it up,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How he saved the drifting company at last,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The disdain and calmness of martyrs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "All these I feel or am.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I fall on the weeds and stones,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Agonies are one of my changes of garments,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Distant and dead resuscitate,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am there again.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Again the long roll of the drummers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Again the attacking cannon, mortars,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I take part, I see and hear the whole,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim’d shots,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He gasps through the clot Mind not me⁠—mind⁠—the entrenchments.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(I tell not the fall of Alamo,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemies, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "They were the glory of the race of rangers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not a single one over thirty years of age.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "None obey’d the command to kneel,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My captain lash’d fast with his own hands.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Our frigate takes fire,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The other asks if we demand quarter?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If our colors are struck and the fighting done?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Only three guns are in use,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s main-mast,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Not a moment’s cease,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Serene stands the little captain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "These so, these irretrievable.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "See myself in prison shaped like another man,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And feel the dull unintermitted pain.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Enough! enough! enough!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "That I could forget the mockers and insults!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning!", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I remember now,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I resume the overstaid fraction,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Eleves, I salute you! come forward!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Is he some Southwesterner rais’d out-doors? is he Kanadian?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivetè,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask⁠—lie over!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Say, old top-knot, what do you want?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "When I give I give myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "You there, impotent, loose in the knees,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And anything I have I bestow.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On his right cheek I put the family kiss,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Let the physician and the priest go home.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "O despairer, here is my neck,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Sleep⁠—I and they keep guard all night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not doubt, not disease shall dare to lay finger upon you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I heard what was said of the universe,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is middling well as far as it goes⁠—but is that all?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Magnifying and applying come I,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg’d out at their waists,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A call in the midst of the crowd,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Come my children,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass’d his prelude on the reeds within.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Easily written loose-finger’d chords⁠—I feel the thrum of your climax and close.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My head slues round on my neck,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Music rolls, but not from the organ,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Ever the hard unsunk ground,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This is the city and I am one of the citizens,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "What I do and say the same waits for them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I know perfectly well my own egotism,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Not words of routine this song of mine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "This printed and bound book⁠—but the printer and the printing-office boy?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The well-taken photographs⁠—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets⁠—but the pluck of the captain and engineers?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture⁠—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The sky up there⁠—yet here or next door, or across the way?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The saints and sages in history⁠—but you yourself?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Sermons, creeds, theology⁠—but the fathomless human brain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Making a fetish of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "How the flukes splash!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I take my place among you as much as among any,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not know what is untried and afterward,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d, nor the brutish koboo call’d the ordure of humanity,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "It is time to explain myself⁠—let us stand up.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "What is known I strip away,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The clock indicates the moment⁠—but what does eternity indicate?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Births have brought us richness and variety,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And other births will bring us richness and variety.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not call one greater and one smaller,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "That which fills its period and place is equal to any.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(What have I to do with lamentation?)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Long I was hugg’d close⁠—long and long.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Immense have been the preparations for me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "For it the nebula cohered to an orb,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The long slow strata piled to rest it on,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity!", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "O manhood, balanced, florid and full.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My lovers suffocate me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Lighting on every moment of my life,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And the dark hush promulges as much as any.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Outward and outward and forever outward.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "We should surely bring up again where we now stand,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They are but parts, any thing is but a part.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My left hand hooking you round the waist,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You must travel it for yourself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "It is not far, it is within reach,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For after we start we never lie by again.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "You are also asking me questions and I hear you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Sit a while dear son,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a goodbye kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Now I wash the gum from your eyes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I am the teacher of athletes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "My words itch at your ears till you understand them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "No shutter’d room or school can commune with me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But roughs and little children better than they.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The young mother and old mother comprehend me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "They and all would resume what I have told them.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I have said that the soul is not more than the body,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Why should I wish to see God better than this day?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Others will punctually come forever and ever.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "O suns⁠—O grass of graves⁠—O perpetual transfers and promotions,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If you do not say anything how can I say anything?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Toss, sparkles of day and dusk⁠—toss on the black stems that decay in the muck,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "There is that in me⁠—I do not know what it is⁠—but I know it is in me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Wrench’d and sweaty⁠—calm and cool then my body becomes,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I sleep⁠—I sleep long.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I do not know it⁠—it is without name⁠—it is a word unsaid,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Do you see O my brothers and sisters?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It is not chaos or death⁠—it is form, union, plan⁠—it is eternal life⁠—it is Happiness.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The past and present wilt⁠—I have fill’d them, emptied them,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Do I contradict myself?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Very well then I contradict myself,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "(I am large, I contain multitudes.)", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Who wishes to walk with me?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "The last scud of day holds back for me,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "And filter and fibre your blood.", "indent": 0 } ], [ { "text": "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "Missing me one place search another,", "indent": 0 }, { "text": "I stop somewhere waiting for you.", "indent": 0 } ] ] }