The plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, the poor results of all,
The aimless and resultless ways of most human lives,
The empty and useless years of the rest—
With the rest me intertwined!

Let me indeed turn upon myself a little of the light I have been so fond of casting on others,
I live the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Every thought that flounders in them the same flounders in me,
I know the unspoken interrogatories, by experience I know them,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me.

Ye downcast hours, I know ye also,
I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair, and unbelief,
No one could have more doubts of me than I have of myself,
The doubts of daytime and the doubts of nighttime,
How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
From shadows deep and dark, out of the still and pensive evening,
A procession of ghosts in arriere, in the soul’s twilight,
Of all those angry wrestlings, those absurd trusts, those rejections, hauteurs, shames.

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also.
You say you are a great fool—don’t you know every acute fellow secretly knows that about himself—I do.

But maybe one is now reading this who meets all my grand assumptions and egotisms with derision—
As if I never deride myself!
Myself forever reproaching myself, for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?
Or maybe one who is puzzled at me—
As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Me, so puzzling, wandering and confused, ill-assorted, contradictory.

O me repellent and ugly!
Behold this swarthy face—
A face with two gray eyes, where passion and hauteur sleep,
And melancholy stands behind them—
My brown hands and the silent manner of me without charm,
The white wool unclipt upon my neck.

I have made my mistakes too—many of them,
Have not always got events, myself, into right perspectives,
Have said things that should not have been said,
Have been silent when I should have spoken—
In all that I, too, have been guilty enough.

O me, man of slack faith so long,
Me with mole’s eyes, unrisen to buoyancy and vision—unfree,
Lost to myself, lost as if a stranger, even as I am a stranger on this earth,
More like nobody than like somebody.

What do I know of life? what of myself?
Even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clues and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here,
And those appear that perplex me,
(As to that, who is aware of his own nature?)
At once I find the least thing that belongs to me, or that I see or touch, I know not,
I perceive I have not really understood anything, not a single object, and that no man ever can.

I know not even my own work past or present,
The best I had done seems to me blank and suspicious,
My greatest thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre, shallow, mere exhalations?
What wretched shred e’en at the best of all?
Maybe I’m not so far ahead as I think I am,
Maybe Walt Whitman’s not ahead of the world at all,
Maybe the world’s ahead of Walt Whitman.

Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all,
The “Leaves” often defy me to turn them,
Will they germinate anything? will they filter to any deep emotion? any heart and brain?
Has not the chaos of my pages its enclosing purport, its clue or formulation?
Upon the whole, it evades me more than anybody.
Before all my arrogant poems, amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me,
My tongue the shallowest of any, still uttering, still ejaculating—
Canst never cease this babble?

Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or am I raving?
Would not people laugh at me?
The real me is withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I haven’t solidified myself,
I know I am restless and make others so,
I plan out my little schemes for the future, and cogitate fancies,
And occasionally there floats forth like wreaths of smoke, and about as substantial, my daydreams,
Dim ever-shifting guesses spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me;
My ought-to-have-been is upset, made light of, scattered, put to rout, by what is.

So many failures, (amid no loud call or market for my sort of poetic utterance,) so much unsatisfactory,
The fortunes, misfortunes, through many years,
Those toils and struggles of baffled impeded articulation, unfoldings so copious, often inopportune,
Those moods of proudest ambition and daring, quickly followed by deeper moods of qualm, despair, utter distrust of one’s-self,
Those startings out, beating flights of wings, uncertain where you will soar, or bring up,
Or whether you will soar at all, to end perhaps in ignominious fall and failure—
All carried along and merged in the afterwards, the way things work, the apparent terminations, the results so unexpected,
The vex’d corrosion so pensive and so painful.

Where is what I started for so long ago?
Why is it yet unfound, though I have diligently sought it many a long year?
I do not feel that I have achieved what might be called a standing—far from that,
I am still only on the edge of the world—the margin of its margin,
And what is my destination? O I fear it is henceforth chaos!

As for me, torn, stormy, amid these vehement days,
Utter defeat upon me weighs—all lost—the foe victorious;
Poor and paralyzed, venting a heavy heart,
Hell and despair are upon me, I am too full of woe!
In sighs at night in rage dissatisfied with myself,
In those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs,
My soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank,
My best moods seem to shun me.

Dim and dreadful thoughts have lately been floating through my brain,
Doubts to be solv’d, blanks to be fill’d,
I am getting savage, my brain feels rack’d, bewilder’d,
My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
There seems to be no relief.

One doubt, nauseous, undulating like a snake, crawls on the ground before me,
Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low:
I am incomplete.
A sense comes always crushing in on me, as of one happiness I have missed,
One friend and companion I have never made.

O cruel hands that hold me powerless,
O helpless soul of me,
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!
Weights of lead, how ye clog and cling at my ankles,
Baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
That this earthly habitation is a place of torment to my miserable self, is made painfully evident every day of existence.

Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,
Sea waters ever-rolling and rushing in or out—never placid, never calm—
Surely they please this uneasy spirit, me, that ebbs and flows too all the while,
Yet gets nowhere and amounts to nothing.

We murmur alike reproachfully, rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,
I too leave little wrecks upon you,
I too am but a trail of drift and debris,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

What we are we are,
These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all—
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses drifted at random,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
Buoy’d hither from the storm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random.
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

O who is that ghost, that form in the dark,
In the night, in solitude, tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand,
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand,
Streaming tears, sobbing tears, moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head,
The measureless waters of human tears.
O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace,
But away at night as you fly, none looking—
O then the unloosen’d ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears!

Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake—
That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears, and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning!

Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d,
Press forth red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,
Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

NEXT: TRANSCENDING DOUBT AND DESPAIR

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).