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Home: Poetry: Walt Whitman: Spontaneous Me
| SPONTANEOUS ME |
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a poem by Walt Whitman
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- Spontaneous me, Nature,
- The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
- The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,
- The hillside whiten'd with blossoms of the mountain ash,
- The same late in autumn, the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark green,
- The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private untrimm'd bank, the primitive apples, the pebble-stones,
- Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after another as I happen to call them to me or think of them,
- The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
- The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
- This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry,
- (Know once for all, avow'd on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty lurking masculine poems,)
- Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,
- Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts of love, bellies press'd and glued together with love,
- Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love,
- The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the man, the body of the earth,
- Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,
- The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down, that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied;
- The wet of woods through the early hours,
- Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other,
- The smell of apples, aromas from crush'd sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,
- The boy's longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming,
- The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and content to the ground,
- The no-form'd stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,
- The hubb'd sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any one,
- The sensitive, orbic, underlapp'd brothers, that only privileged feelers may be intimate where they are,
- The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body, the bashful withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge themselves,
- The limpid liquid within the young man,
- The vex'd corrosion so pensive and so painful,
- The torment, the irritable tide that will not be at rest,
- The like of the same I feel, the like of the same in others,
- The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that flushes and flushes,
- The young man that wakes deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master him,
- The mystic amorous night, the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
- The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers, the young man all color'd, red, ashamed, angry;
- The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,
- The merriment of the twin babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them,
- The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen'd long-round walnuts,
- The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,
- The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent,
- The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,
- The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters,
- The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate what shall produce boys to fill my place when I am through,
- The wholesome relief, repose, content,
- And this bunch pluck'd at random from myself,
- It has done its work--I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.
| "Spontaneous Me" is reprinted from Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman. Brooklyn: Fowler & Wells, 1856. |
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