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

cannot have their

counterpart of on the same terms.

 

Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the

father-stuff,

And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

 

Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

 

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

 

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me

is a miracle.

 

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am

touch’d from,

The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

 

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of

my own body, or any part of it,

Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!

You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!

Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!

My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!

Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded

duplicate eggs! it shall be you!

Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!

Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!

Sun so generous it shall be you!

Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!

You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!

Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!

Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my

winding paths, it shall be you!

Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d,

it shall be you.

 

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,

Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,

I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,

Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the

friendship I take again.

 

That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics

of books.

 

To behold the daybreak!

The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,

The air tastes good to my palate.

 

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising

freshly exuding,

Scooting obliquely high and low.

 

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,

Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

 

The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,

The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,

The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

 

25

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.

 

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

 

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

 

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,

It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,

Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?

 

Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of

articulation,

Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?

Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,

The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,

I underlying causes to balance them at last,

My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,

Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search

of this day.)

 

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,

Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,

I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

 

Writing and talk do not prove me,

I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,

With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

 

26

Now I will do nothing but listen,

To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

 

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,

clack of sticks cooking my meals,

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of

work-people at their meals,

The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing

a death-sentence,

The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the

refrain of the anchor-lifters,

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,

The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

 

I hear the violoncello, (‘tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

 

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.

 

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,

The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

 

I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,

It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,

I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,

Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being.

 

27

To be in any form, what is that?

(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)

If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

 

Mine is no callous shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

 

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

 

28

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,

Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,

My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly

different from myself,

On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,

Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,

Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,

Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,

Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,

Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,

Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,

They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,

No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,

Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,

Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

 

The sentries desert every other part of me,

They have left me helpless to a red marauder,

They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

 

I am given up by traitors,

I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the

greatest traitor,

I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

 

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,

Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

 

29

Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!

Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

 

Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,

Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

 

Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,

Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

 

30

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

The insignificant is as big to me as any,

(What is less or more than a touch?)

 

Logic and sermons never convince,

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

 

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,

Only what nobody denies is so.)

 

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,

I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,

And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,

And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,

And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it

becomes omnific,

And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

 

31

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg

of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

 

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,

grains, esculent roots,

And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,

And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,

But call any thing back again when I desire it.

 

In vain the speeding or shyness,

In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,

In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,

In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,

In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,

In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,

In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,

In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,

In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,

I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

 

32

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and

self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

 

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for