Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary (Iowa Whitman Series)

by Walt Whitman

Silly to imagine that we know more than an animal. Sillier yet to think that we are not on the same team.

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited, The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited; There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

Thiis is the promise of democracy, as yet unfulfilled. This, too, is the promise of the wedding feast of the lamb, a table set for all to partake.

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 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.

I am the 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 believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.