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

by Walt Whitman

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred, No matter who it is, it is sacred — is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, Each has his or her place in the procession.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?

(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?)

I Dream’d in a Dream Table of Contents I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, I dream’d that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest, It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.

Each of us inevitable, Each of us limitless — each of us with his or her right upon the earth, Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth, Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods. O the mother’s joys! The watching, the endurance, the precious love, the anguish, the patiently yielded life.

(O something pernicious and dread! Something far away from a puny and pious life! Something unproved! something in a trance! Something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.)

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves, The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies,

Really? Once "we" had contempt for these?

Away with themes of war! away with war itself! Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated corpses! That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men, And in its stead speed industry’s campaigns, With thy undaunted armies, engineering, Thy pennants labor, loosen’d to the breeze, Thy bugles sounding loud and clear.

We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,

Thought Table of Contents Of Equality — as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself — as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.

As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)

What kept you from sleep Walt? How about stress and depression?

O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision and science, Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future. (Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual — namely to You.

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God? And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?

Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful.

Proud Music of the Storm 1 Proud music of the storm, Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,

Ah from a little child, Thou knowest soul how to me all sounds became music,

That is me too.

swear I think now that every thing without exception has an eternal soul!

How the trees rise and stand up, with strong trunks, with branches and leaves! (Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul.)

“Life, life an endless march, an endless army, (no halt, but it is duly over,) “The world, the race, the soul — in space and time the universes, “All bound as is befitting each — all surely going somewhere.”