Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman [books to read for 12 year olds txt] 📗

matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and

the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,

For you only, and not for him and her?

 

7

A man’s body at auction,

(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)

I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

 

Gentlemen look on this wonder,

Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,

For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one

animal or plant,

For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

 

In this head the all-baffling brain,

In it and below it the makings of heroes.

 

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in

tendon and nerve,

They shall be stript that you may see them.

 

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,

good-sized arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

 

Within there runs blood,

The same old blood! the same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires,

reachings, aspirations,

(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in

parlors and lecture-rooms?)

 

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be

fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

 

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring

through the centuries?

(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace

back through the centuries?)

 

8

A woman’s body at auction,

She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,

She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

 

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?

Have you ever loved the body of a man?

Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations

and times all over the earth?

 

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,

And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,

And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more

beautiful than the most beautiful face.

 

Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool

that corrupted her own live body?

For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

 

9

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and

women, nor the likes of the parts of you,

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of

the soul, (and that they are the soul,)

I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and

that they are my poems,

Man’s, woman’s, child, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s,

father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,

Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,

Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or

sleeping of the lids,

Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,

Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,

Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,

Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the

ample side-round of the chest,

Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,

Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger,

finger-joints, finger-nails,

Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,

Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,

Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round,

man-balls, man-root,

Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,

Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,

Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;

All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your

body or of any one’s body, male or female,

The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,

The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,

Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,

Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,

The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,

love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,

The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,

Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,

Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,

The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,

The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked

meat of the body,

The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,

The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward

toward the knees,

The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the

marrow in the bones,

The exquisite realization of health;

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,

O I say now these are the soul!

 

} A Woman Waits for Me

 

A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,

Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the

right man were lacking.

 

Sex contains all, bodies, souls,

Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,

Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,

All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves,

beauties, delights of the earth,

All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,

These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

 

Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,

Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

 

Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,

I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with those women that

are warm-blooded and sufficient for me,

I see that they understand me and do not deny me,

I see that they are worthy of me, I will be the robust husband of

those women.

 

They are not one jot less than I am,

They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,

Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,

They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,

retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,

They are ultimate in their own right—they are calm, clear,

well-possess’d of themselves.

 

I draw you close to me, you women,

I cannot let you go, I would do you good,

I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for

others’ sakes,

Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,

They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.

 

It is I, you women, I make my way,

I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,

I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,

I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I

press with slow rude muscle,

I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,

I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.

 

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,

In you I wrap a thousand onward years,

On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,

The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls,

new artists, musicians, and singers,

The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,

I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,

I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you

interpenetrate now,

I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I

count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,

I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death,

immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

 

} Spontaneous Me

 

Spontaneous me, Nature,

The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,

The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,

The hillside whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,

The same late in autumn, the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and

light and dark green,

The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private

untrimm’d bank, the primitive apples, the pebble-stones,

Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after

another as I happen to call them to me or think of them,

The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)

The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,

This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all

men carry,

(Know once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are

our lusty lurking masculine poems,)

Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers,

and the climbing sap,

Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts

of love, bellies press’d and glued together with love,

Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love,

The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the

man, the body of the earth,

Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,

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;

The wet of woods through the early hours,

Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with

an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other,

The smell of apples, aromas from crush’d sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,

The boy’s longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what

he was dreaming,

The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and

content to the ground,

The no-form’d stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,

The hubb’d sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any

one,

The sensitive, orbic, underlapp’d brothers, that only privileged

feelers may be intimate where they are,

The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body, the bashful

withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and

edge themselves,

The limpid liquid within the young man,

The vex’d corrosion so pensive and so painful,

The torment, the irritable tide that will not be at rest,

The like of the same I feel, the like of the same in others,

The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that

flushes and flushes,

The young man that wakes deep at night, the hot hand seeking to

repress what would master him,

The mystic amorous night, the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,

The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers,

the young man all color’d, red, ashamed, angry;

The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,

The merriment of the twin babes that crawl over the grass in the

sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them,

The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen’d

long-round walnuts,

The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,

The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent,

while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent,

The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,

The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters,

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,

The wholesome relief, repose, content,

And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,

It has done its work—I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.