WALT WHITMAN - Song of Myself

The smoke of my own breath;

Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine; 

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood

and air through my lungs;

dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn; 

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and

A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms; 

The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies

of the wind; 

The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag; 
hill-sides;

meeting the sun.
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and



Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth

much? 

Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? 

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the
left;) 
 eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books; 

You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me: