{
 "id": "walt-whitman/spontaneous-me",
 "title": "Spontaneous Me",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Walt Whitman",
 "poet_slug": "walt-whitman",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Leaves of Grass",
 "book_slug": "leaves-of-grass",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 31,
 "container": "Children of Adam",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1856,
  "venue": "Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856)",
  "note": "Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1856 Fowler & Wells edition (ppp.00237). The corpus text follows the 1891–92 arrangement, by which the poem had been revised. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://whitmanarchive.org/item/ppp.00237"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass",
  "file": "children-of-adam.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": 45,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 219,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Spontaneous me, Nature,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The hillside whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The same late in autumn, the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark green,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private untrimm’d bank, the primitive apples, the pebble-stones,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after another as I happen to call them to me or think of them,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Know once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty lurking masculine poems,)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts of love, bellies press’d and glued together with love,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the man, the body of the earth,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down, that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The wet of woods through the early hours,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The smell of apples, aromas from crush’d sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The boy’s longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and content to the ground,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The no-form’d stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The hubb’d sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any one,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The sensitive, orbic, underlapp’d brothers, that only privileged feelers may be intimate where they are,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body, the bashful withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge themselves,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The limpid liquid within the young man,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The vex’d corrosion so pensive and so painful,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The torment, the irritable tide that will not be at rest,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The like of the same I feel, the like of the same in others,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that flushes and flushes,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The young man that wakes deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master him,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The mystic amorous night, the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers, the young man all color’d, red, ashamed, angry;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The merriment of the twin babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen’d long-round walnuts,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate what shall produce boys to fill my place when I am through,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The wholesome relief, repose, content,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "It has done its work⁠—I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}