 I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul. The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me. The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. I am a poet of the woman, the same as the man, and I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, and I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. I chant the chant of dilation or pride. We have had ducking and deprecating about enough. I show that size is only development. Have you outstripped the rest? Are you the president? It is a trifle. They will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on. I am he that walks with a tender and growing night. I call to the earth and sea half held by the night. Press close, bare bosomed night. Press close, magnetic, nourishing night. Night of south winds, night of the large-view stars. Still knotting night, mad naked summer night. Smile of voluptuous cool-breath earth, earth of the slumbering and liquid trees, earth of departed sunset, earth of the mountains misty-topped, earth of the vitreous pore of the full moon just tinged with blue, earth of shine and dark mottling, the tide of the river, earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake, far-swooping elbowed earth, rich apple-blossomed earth, smile for your lover comes, prodigal you have given me love, therefore I to you give love, oh unspeakable, passionate love. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. O Span of Youth, ever pushed elasticity, O manhood, balanced, florid and full. My lovers suffocate me, crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin, jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night, crying by day, ahoy, from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head, calling my name from flower beds, vines, tangled underbrush, lighting on every moment of my life, bussing my body with soft balsamic buses, noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine. Old age superbly rising, oh welcome, ineffable grace of dying days. Every condition promulgates not only itself, it promulgates what grows after and out of itself, and the dark hush promulgates as much as any. I open my scuttle at night and see the far sprinkling systems, and all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim of the father's systems, wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, outward and outward and forever outward. My son has his son and round him obediently wheels. He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, and greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them. There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage. If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run. He would surely bring up again where we now stand, and surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther. A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient. They are but parts, anything is but a part. Be ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that. Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain. The Lord will be there, and wait till I come on perfect terms. The great camarado, the lover true, for whom I pine, will be there. I have filled them, emptied them, and proceeded to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there, what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening. Talk honestly, no one hears you. I stay only a minute longer. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. I concentrate towards them that are nigh. I wait on the door slab. Who has done his day's work? Who will soonest be through with this supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late? I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yop 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 shadowed 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 drifted in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. 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 fiber your blood. Sailing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged, missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere, waiting for you. 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 loathe and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed 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, creeds and schools in abeyance, retiring back a while, suffice 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. This recording is in the public domain. Song of Myself, Section 2, by Walt Whitman. Houses and rooms are full of perfumes. The shelves are crowded with perfumes. I breathe the fragrance myself and know it, and like it. The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume. It has no taste of the distillation. It is odorless. It is for my mouth forever. I am in love with it. I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked. I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath echoes, ripples, buzzed whispers, love root, silk thread, crotch and vine. My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs. The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-coloured sea rocks, and of hay in the barn. The sound of the belched words of my voice loosed to the eddies of the wind. A few light kisses, a few embraces, are reaching a round of arms. The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple bows wag. The delight alone or in the rush of the streets or along the fields and hillsides. The feeling of health, the full noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practised so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems. You shall possess the good of the earth and sun. There are millions of suns left. You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me. You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. I have heard what the talkers were talking. The talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more an inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now, and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge. Always the procreate urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance. Always substance and increase. Always sex. Always a knit of identity. Always distinction. Always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail. Learned and unlearned feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb to the uprights, well entreated, braced in the beams, stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age, vex's age. Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things while they discuss, I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean. At an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied. I see, dance, laugh, sing. As the hugging and loving bedfellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, leaving me baskets covered with white towels swelling the house with their plenty. While I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, that they turn from gazing after and down the road, and forthwith cipher and show me to assent exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Long of Myself, Section 4, by Walt Whitman. People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life, or the ward and city I live in, or the nation. The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new. My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues. The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love. The sickness of one of my folks, or myself, or ill-doing, or loss, or lack of money, or depressions, or exaltations, battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events. These come to me days and nights, and go from me again. But they are not the me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am. Stands amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, unitary. Looks down? Is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest? Looking with side-curved head, curious what will come next? Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders. I have no mockings or arguments. I witness and wait. Read for LibriVox.org by Alan Davis Drake. I believe in you, my soul. The other I am must not abase itself to you, and you must not be abased to the other. Life with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat. Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best. Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvud voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, how you settled your head adthwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, and parted the shirt from my bosom bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart, and reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth. And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, and I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, and that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and all the women my sisters and lovers, and that the kelson of the creation is love, and limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, and brown ants in the little wells beneath them, and mossy scabs of the worm-fence, heaped stones, elder, mollan, and pokeweed. A child said, What is the grass, fetching it to me with full hands? How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green-stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord. A scented gift and remembrance are designedly dropped, bearing the owner's name somewhat in the corners, that we may see and remark and say, Whose? Or I guess the grass itself is a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyph. And it means, sprouting like broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white, canuck, tuck-a-ho, congressman, cuff, I give them the same. I receive them the same. 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 mother's laps. And here you are the mother's 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. Oh, I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, 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 ceased the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward. Nothing collapses. And to die is different from what any one supposed. And luckier. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Long of Myself, Section 7 by Walt Whitman. Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new washed babe, and am not contained between my hat and boots. And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good. The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. I am not an earth, nor an adjunct of an earth. I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself. I do not know how immortal, but I know. Every kind for itself, and its own. For me, mine male and female. For me, those that have been boys, and that loved women. For me, the man that is proud, and feels how it stings to be slighted. For me, the sweetheart, and the old maid. And for me, mothers, and the mothers of mothers. For me, lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears. For me, children, and the begatters of children. Undrape, you are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded. I see through the broadcloth and gingham, whether or no. And I am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away. This recording is in the Public Domain. Song of Myself, Section 9, by Walt Whitman. The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready. The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon. The clear light plays on the brown, gray, and green, intertinged. The armfuls are packed to the sagging mow. I am here, I help, I came stretched to top of the load. I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other. I jump from the crossbeams, and seize the clover and timothy. And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair, full of wisps. End of poem. This recording is in the Public Domain. Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman, Section 10, Read for LibriVox.org by Alan Davis Drake. Alone, far in the wilds and mountains, I hunt. Wandering amaze at my own lightness and glee. In the late afternoon, choosing a safe spot to pass the night, kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-killed game, falling asleep on the gathered leaves with my dog and gun by my side. The Yankee clipper is under her sky sails. She cuts the sparkle and scud. My eyes settle the land. I bend at her prow, or shout joyously from the deck. The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopped for me. I tucked my trouser ends in my boots, and went and had a good time. You should have been with us that day round the Chowder Kettle. I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west. The bride was a red girl. Her father and her friends sat cross-legged and dumbly smoking. They had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders. On a bank lounged the trapper. He was dressed mostly in skins. His luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck. He held his bride by the hand. She had long lashes. Her head was bare. Her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reached to her feet. The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside. I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile. Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpy and weak, and went where he sat on a log and let him in and assured him, and brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet, and gave him a room that entered from my own and gave him some coarse, clean clothes, and remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, and remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles. He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north. I had him sit next to me at table. My firelock leaned in the corner. The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market. I loiter, enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown. Blacksmiths with grime than hairy chests environ the anvil. Each has his main sledge. They are all out. There is a great heat in the fire. From the cinder-strewed threshold I follow their movements. The lithe shear of their waists plays even with their massive arms. Then the hammer swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure. They do not hasten. Each man hits in his place. The Negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses. The block swags underneath on its tied-over chain. The Negro that drives the long dray of the stoneyard, steady and tall, he stands poised on one leg on the string-piece. His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band. His glance is calm and commanding. He tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead. The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polished and perfect limbs. I behold the picturesque giant and love him. I do not stop there. I go with the team also. In me the caressor of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward slewing, to niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing, absorbing all to myself and for this song. Dockson that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade. What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble. They rise together. They slowly circle around. I believe in those winged purposes and acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me and consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional, and do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else. And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Song of Myself, Section 14, by Walt Whitman. The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night. Yahonk, he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation. The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I, listening close, find its purpose and place up there towards the wintery sky. The sharp hooved moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie dog, the litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, the brood of the turkey hen, and she with her half-spread wings. I see in them and myself the same old law. The press of my foot to the earth brings a hundred affections. They scorn the best I can do to relate them. I am enamored of growing outdoors, of men that live among cattle, or taste the ocean or woods, of the builders and stirrers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls and the drivers of horses. I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me. Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns, adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me, not asking the sky to come down to my good will, scattering it freely, for ever. The Poets Delay by Henry David Thoreau Read for LibraVox.org by Alan Davis-Strake In vain I see the morning rise. In vain observe the western blaze, who idly looks to other skies, expecting life by other ways. Amidst such boundless wealth without, I only still am poor within. The birds have sung their summer out, but still my spring does not begin. Shall I then wait the autumn wind, compelled to seek a milder day, and leave no curious nest behind, no woods still echoing to my lay? End of poem, this recording is in the public domain. Salmon Brook by Henry David Thoreau Read for LibraVox.org by Alan Davis-Strake Salmon Brook, Pinnachook, Ye sweet waters of my brain, When shall I look or cast the hook in your waves again? Silver eels, wooden creels, These the baits that still allore, And dragon fly that floated by, May they still endure, End of poem, this recording is in the public domain. I am the autumnal son by Henry David Thoreau. Read for LibraVox.org by Alan Davis-Strake Sometimes a mortal feels in himself nature, not his father, but his mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. From time to time she claims kindredship with us, And some globule from her veins steals up into our own. I am the autumnal son with autumn gales my races run. When will the hazel put forth its flowers, Or the grape ripen under my bowers? When will the harvest or the hunter's moon Turn my midnight into midnight? I am all seer and yellow, And to my core mellow. The mast is drooping within my woods, The winter is lurking within my moods, And the rustling of the withered leaf Is the constant music of my grief. End of poem, this recording is in the public domain. LONG OF MYSELF, SECTION TWENTY-TWO, by Walt Whitman Read for LibraVox.org by Alan Davis-Strake You see! I resign myself to you also. I guess what you mean. I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers. I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me. We must have a turn together. I undress. Free me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me and billowy drows. Dash me with amorous wet. I can repay you. Sea of stretched ground swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life, And of unshoveled yet always ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, Capricious and dainty sea. I am integral with you. I too am of one phase and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux, I extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each other's arms. I am he a testing sympathy. Shall I make my list of things in the house, And skip the house that supports them? I am not the poet of goodness only. I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me. I stand indifferent. My gate is no fault finders or rejectors gate. I moisten the roots of all that has grown. Did you fear some scrawfula out of the unflagging pregnancy? Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be worked over and rectified? I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance. Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine. Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start. This minute that comes to me over the past desillions, There is no better than it and now. What behaved well in the past or behaves well today is not such a wonder. The wonder is always and always how they