{
 "id": "walt-whitman/to-you-2",
 "title": "To You",
 "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": 96,
 "container": "Birds of Passage",
 "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": "birds-of-passage.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": 11,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 162,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Your true soul and body appear before me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I whisper with my lips close to your ear,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "O I have been dilatory and dumb,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I should have made my way straight to you long ago,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "None has understood you, but I understand you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "You have not known what you are, you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "What you have done returns already in mockeries,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "The mockeries are not you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I pursue you where none else has pursued you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Silence, the dusk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others they do not balk me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}