Song of myself by walt whitman 1, 6, 20, 52

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman 1, 6, 20, 52

 Song of Myself

1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their

parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

(10) Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy.

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6

A child said What is the grass ? fetching it to me with full hands;

(100) How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any

more than he.

I guess it must be the ?ag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stu? woven.

 Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, 

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, 

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

 Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

 Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, 

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, 

Growing among black folks as among white, 

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

 (110) And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

 Tenderly will I use you curling grass, 

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, 

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, 

It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps, 

And here you are the mothers’ laps.

 This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

 Darker than the colorless beards of old men, 

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

 O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, 

(120) And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, 

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

 What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

 They are alive and well somewhere, 

The smallest sprout shows there is really no  death, 

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, 

And ceas’d the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 

 (130) And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

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20

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;

(390) How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat ?

What is a 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 and filth.

 Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,

 I wear my hat as I please indoors or 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, 

(400) I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

 In all people I see myself, none more and not one a 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 ?ow,

 All are written to me, and I must get what the 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, 

(410) 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 to-day or on 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, 

420) I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.

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52 

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

 I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

 I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

 The last scud of day holds back for me,

 It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,

 It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

 I depart as air,

 I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

 I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

 I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, 

(1340) If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

 You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, 

And filter and fibre your blood.

 Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.