Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate
and conciliation,
Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’
arms.
I am he attesting 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 gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s
gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d
over and rectified?
I find one side a balance and the antipedal 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 decillions,
There is no better than it and now.
What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day
is not such wonder,
The wonder is always and always how there can be a
mean man or an infidel.
23
Endless unfolding of words of ages!
And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.
A word of the faith that never balks,
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept
Time absolutely.
It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes
all,
That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this
made a grammar of
the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown
seas.
This is the geologist, this works with the scalper,
and this is a
mathematician.
Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.
Less the reminders of properties told my words,
And more the reminders they of life untold, and of
freedom and extrication,
And make short account of neuters and geldings, and
favor men and
women fully equipt,
And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives
and them that
plot and conspire.
24
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women
or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.