{
 "id": "walt-whitman/this-compost",
 "title": "This Compost",
 "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": 196,
 "container": "Autumn Rivulets",
 "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": "autumn-rivulets.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": 47,
  "n_stanzas": 6,
  "n_parts": 2,
  "longest_line_chars": 126,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [
  {
   "ordinal": "1",
   "title": null,
   "stanza_range": [
    0,
    3
   ]
  },
  {
   "ordinal": "2",
   "title": null,
   "stanza_range": [
    3,
    6
   ]
  }
 ],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Something startles me where I thought I was safest,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I withdraw from the still woods I loved,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I will not go now on the pastures to walk,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "How can you be alive you growths of spring?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Where have you disposed of their carcasses?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Behold this compost! behold it well!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person⁠—yet behold!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The grass of spring covers the prairies,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "What chemistry!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That the winds are really not infectious,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That all is clean forever and forever,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}