Leaves Of Grass: The First Edition of 1855 + The Death Bed Edition of 1892

by Walt Whitman

Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs...

Working out of "Song of Prudence". Goes thru p. 34.

and who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries or avoids death.

End.

Song of Myself (1855)

I Sing the Body Electric (1855)

There Was a Child Went Forth (1855)

One’s-Self I Sing

The Female equally with the Male I sing.

In Cabin’d Ships at Sea

The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm, The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here, And this is ocean’s poem.

Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny, You not a reminiscence of the land alone, You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos’d I know not whither, yet ever full of faith,

Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the imperious waves,

To Foreign Lands

I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

To a Historian

You who celebrate bygones, Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself, Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests,

I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights,

To Thee Old Cause

Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands, After a strange sad war, great war for thee, (I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be really fought, for thee,)

Around the idea of thee the war revolving, With all its angry and vehement play of causes, (With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,)

Eidolons

These recitatives for thee, — my book and the war are one,

This notion seems to come up a lot so far.

When I Read the Book

To the States

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

On Journeys Through the States

We confer on equal terms with each of the States,

To a Certain Cantatrice

I wonder who this was.

Me Imperturbe

Cool, calm, collected.

The Ship Starting

See "In Cabin'd Ships at Sea"

I Hear America Singing

Shut Not Your Doors

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries, For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring, Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made, The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,

Poets to Come

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.

Thou Reader

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I, Therefore for thee the following chants.

Starting from Paumanok

I will sing the song of companionship, I will show what alone must finally compact these, I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it in me,

I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening to consume me, I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires, I will give them complete abandonment,

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love, For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy? And who ...

I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion,

A religion of the self, I believe.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough, None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough, None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,

My comrade! For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.

And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other, And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin’d to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,

I will not make poems with reference to parts, But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,

O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only. O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly! O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild! O now I triumph — and you shall also; O hand in hand — O wholesome pleasure — O one more desirer and lover! O to haste firm holding — to haste, haste on with me.

Gotta be a man.

Song of Myself

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

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.