What I give you, I know, cannot be argued about,
I do not prove anything to the intellect.
The greatest of thoughts and truths are not susceptible of proof like a sum in simple multiplication,
What establishes itself in the age, in the heart, is finally the only logic,
Can boast of the only real verification.
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

What the world calls logic is beyond me,
I only go about my business taking on impressions—reporting impressions—
Though sometimes I imagine that what we see is superior to what we reason about.
Back of all else in me is feeling, emotional substance,
I have feelings about things, nothing more—
I feel this to be true.
I am more likely to have feelings than theories about things,
Feeling goes way beyond proving most of the time.

I have very little faculty or liking for a book which requires the observance of rules of logic—I have a damned ill-regulated mind. I am more likely any time to be governed by my intuitive than by my critical self. I do not intend this as a warrant for wildness and frantic escapades—but to justify the soul’s frequent joy in what cannot be defined to the intellectual part, or to calculation.

I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
We convince by our presence,
Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and everything else in my face,
I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic—
Do I not prove myself?
What I tell requires no further proof than he or she who will hear me will furnish by silently meditating alone. 

There’s your logical faculty buzzing again—you’re unbearable when you get going on that tack. A hankering after problems, explanations, metaphysicalisms is to me an obvious weakening, a bad investment. Get past the intellectual sinuosities, follow your own intuition, feeling sure that in the long run no other guide can lead you so surely to the truth. Then your way is clear.
I am not so anxious to give you the truth. But I am very anxious to have you understand that all truth and power are feeble to you except your own. 

Are you faithful to things?
Do you teach what the land and sea, the bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?
Have you known that your hands are to grasp vigorously?
You are also to grasp with your mind vigorously;
Intellect is to me but as hands, or eyesight, or as a vessel.

If you have not yet learned to think, enter upon it now,
(Remember how many pass their whole lives and hardly once think and never learned themselves to think.)
Think at once with directness, breadth, aim, conscientiousness,
You will find a strange pleasure from the start and grow rapidly each successive week;
I perceive that sages, poets, inventors, benefactors, lawgivers, are only those who have thought.

Who thinks the amplest thoughts? For I will surround those thoughts,
I know all and expose it,
My knowledge my live parts,
It keeping tally with the meaning of all things.

Lessons to think I scatter as they come,
What else remains? The old ones being attained, what deeper, new problem?
What other passage to India?
Every great problem is the passage to India—
Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!
Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!
You, strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you.

Thou too, 0 my Soul, takest thou passage to India?
Then have thy bent unleash’d—
O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,
Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,
Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,
To reason’s early paradise,
Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,
Again with fair creation,
Passage indeed O soul to primal thought! thy own clear freshness,
To the mystic wisdom, to all the linked transcendental streams, their sources.

I put a second brain to the brain,
From the hearing proceeds another hearing,
From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight,
My sight, that was bound in my eyes, unclosed, as to long panoramas of visions.

I am afoot with my visions, 
My ties and ballasts leave me, I travel, I sail,
Of this country and every country, indoors and outdoors,
One just as much as the other I see, and all else behind or through them,
In the ground and sea, and where it is neither ground nor sea,
Nigher and farther the same I see.

I wander all night in my visions,
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping.
Now I pierce the darkness,
As in a swoon, one instant, another sun, ineffable, full-dazzles me,
And all the orbs I knew—and brighter, unknown orbs.

O visions staggered with weight of light! with pouring glories!
O purged lumine! O hitherto unequalled!
O crowding too close upon me,
O copious! O thicker and faster!
I am finding how much I can pass through in a few minutes.

O lips becoming tremulous, powerless!
O heights! O infinitely too swift and dizzy yet!
You threaten me more than I can stand!
It appears to me I am dying.

My visions sweep through eternity,
All sorts of fancies running through the head,
Through the interior vistas new beings appear,
Phantasmic, lambent tableaus,
Prophetic, bodiless scenes, spiritual projections,
Something unproved! mystic!
I scan and prophesy outside and in,
The earth recedes ashamed before my prophetical crisis,
I foresee too much, it means more than I thought,
One instant of the future land, heaven’s land.

The subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround and pervade,
In the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,
And the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day.
I know not whether I sleep or wake;
I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before,
Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

I am a mystic in a trance, yet with all the senses alert—a state of high exalted musing—the objective world suspended or surmounted for a while, and the powers in exaltation, freedom, vision—yet the senses not lost or counteracted.

William Blake and Walt Whitman are both mystics, ecstatics. But Blake’s visions displace the normal condition, spurn this visible, objective life. Whitman, though he has the ability to stop thinking at will, and to make his brain “negative” (as he described a gift of his,) and occasionally takes flight with abandon, always holds the mastery over himself, never once loses control or equilibrium. He goes off because he permits himself to do so, while ever the directing principle sits coolly at hand, able to stop the wild teetotum and reduce it to order at any moment. In Whitman, escapades of this sort are the exceptions. The main character of his poetry is the normal, the universal.

NEXT:  THE TRUTH OF BOOKS

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