Here's a few Joyful thoughts by Uncle walt I've been reflecting over today...parlty because it's been a sandpaper- rough emotional abrading week, partly because my co-workers are still acting like royal you-know-what's.....enjoy (sorry Uncle Walt's Song of Joy's are smashed into a poetic heap).....
Yet, O my soul supreme! Know’st thou the joys of pensive thought? Joys of the free and lonesome heart—the tender, gloomy heart?Joy of the solitary walk—the spirit bowed yet proud—the suffering and the struggle? The agonistic throes, the extasies—joys of the solemn musings, day or night? Joys of the thought of Death—the great spheres Time and Space? Prophetic joys of better, loftier love’s ideals—the Divine Wife—the sweet, eternal, perfect Comrade? Joys all thine own, undying one—joys worthy thee, O Soul. 16O, while I live, to be the ruler of life—not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes—no ennui—no more complaints, or scornful criticisms. O me repellent and ugly! To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior Soul impregnable,And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me. O to attract by more than attraction! How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest, It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws. 17O joy of suffering!To struggle against great odds! to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them! to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, death, face to face! To mount the scaffold! to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God! 18O, to sail to sea in a ship! To leave this steady, unendurable land! To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the houses; To leave you, O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship, To sail, and sail, and sail! 19O to have my life henceforth a poem of new joys! To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on, To be a sailor of the world, bound for all ports, A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,) A swift and swelling ship, full of rich words—full of joys.
2 comments:
wonderful poem, thanks. in Leaves of Grass, i take it?
Leaves of Grass baby...or, as Homer Simpson says when he realizes that the purported grave of his mother is really Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass My Ass!!!!!"
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