excerpt from
Song of Myself
-20
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is man anyhow? what am I, what are you?
All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow an
filth.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids,
conformity goes to the forth-remov’d,
I wear my hat as I please indoors and out.
Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be
ceremonious?
Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair,
counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
In all people I see myself, none more and not one barley-
corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what that writing means.
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s
compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a
burnt stick at night.
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my
house by, after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is
myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand
or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I
can wait.
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
by Walt Whitman
from Walt Whitman – Complete Poetry and Collected Prose;
The Library of America, distributed by Viking Press