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

by Walt Whitman

Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City

Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me,

Gotta cover up after the previous poem!

I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ

I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;

In Paths Untrodden

In the growth by margins of pond-waters, Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,

Calamus is the root of a water plant, sometimes called "sweet flag".

Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand

I think he's referring to his book.

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip, Carry me when you go forth over land or sea; For thus merely touching you is enough, is best, And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

But these leaves conning you con at peril, For these leaves and me you will not understand, They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you. Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold! Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book, Nor is it by read...

Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,

Therefore release me and depart on your way.

These I Singing in Spring

Nice poem.

City of Orgies

NYC, I presume?

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

To a Stranger

I found this poem very touching.

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you, You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

No Labor-Saving Machine

Nor literary success nor intellect; nor book for the book-shelf,

You were wrong about that!

Sometimes with One I Love

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another, (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d, Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

Salut au Monde!

A catalog of people, places and things with occasionally problematic commentary. What's the point???

I see mountain peaks,

Glad you studied geography, Walt!

You dim-descended, black, divine-soul’d African, large, fine-headed, nobly-form’d, superbly destin’d, on equal terms with me!

Oh, really??? "Dim descended", indeed!

12

Problematic.

You Hottentot with clicking palate!

!!!

You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon for all your glimmering language and spirituality!

!!!

You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive lip, groveling, seeking your food!

Ugh!

You haggard, uncouth, untutor’d Bedowee!

!!!

You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, ...

!!!

I do not prefer others so very much before you either, I do not say one word against you, away back there where you stand, (You will come forward in due time to my side.)

Gosh, you've said enough already.

Song of the Open Road

Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial, The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted, None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

Always gotta let us know, on the one hand, how broadminded and tolerant he is while disparaging the subjects with the other hand.

I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.

No self esteem problems here or in all the poems I have read up to now.

Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

True enough.

Allons! yet take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance, None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health, Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself, Only those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies, No diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.

Ableism at work.

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Song of the Answerer

Now list to my morning’s romanza, I tell the signs of the Answerer, To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me.

All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy, The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably reaps,

Etc.

He puts things in their attitudes,

Etc.

He is the Answerer, What can be answer’d he answers, and what cannot be answer’d he shows how it cannot be answer’d.

Ah-ha!!! The foregoing.

The person he favors by day or sleeps with at night is blessed.

Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic,

Etc. Chameleon.

What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their words, The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark, but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark,

The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets, The singers are welcom’d, understood, appear often enough, but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the Answerer,

The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible names, but the name of each of them is one of the singers, The name of each is, eye-singer, ear-singer, head-singer, sweet-singer, night-singer, parlor-singer, love-singer, weird-singer, or something else.