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Home: Poetry: Walt Whitman: One Hour to Madness and Joy
| ONE HOUR TO MADNESS AND JOY |
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a poem by Walt Whitman
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- One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
- (What is this that frees me so in storms?
- What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
- O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
- O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
- I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
- O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!
- O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
- O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin'd man.
- O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin'd!
- O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
- To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours!
- To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
- To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
- To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
- O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
- To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
- To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
- To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
- To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
- To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
- To be lost if it must be so!
- To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
- With one brief hour of madness and joy.
| "One Hour to Madness and Joy" is reprinted from Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman. Brooklyn: Fowler & Wells, 1856. |
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