I walk solitary, unattended,
An interval passing at vacancy with nature, acceptive and at ease,
Sane, random, negligent hours,
Wandering the negligent paths,
Every day, seclusion,
Every day at least two or three hours of freedom,
Withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
To warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only.

In this secluded spot the soothing silence,
Far from the clank of crowds,
Away from books, away from art,
The lesson learn’d, pass’d o’er,
I stand or sit, musing,
Thoughts that are the hymns of the praise of things,
Largely learn’d from nature’s schooling.
Give me again O nature your primal sanities!
Thou hast, O nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the rest.

Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun,
The cool-breathed ground, the just-gone sunset, I salute and touch, and they touch me,
I feel the sky, the prairies vast,
I feel the ocean and the forest,
Somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space.
I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day,
Never before did I get so close to nature—absolute and unqualified acceptance of nature—
Never before did she come so close to me.

Amid this wild, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet!
Hungering for primal energies and nature’s dauntlessness,
I refresh myself with it only, I could relish it only,
Nature nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed,
It seems indeed as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly filter into me here in solitude with nature.
The disturb’d passions and the feverish conflict subsided,
Calm and cool then my body becomes,
My sane or sick spirit here as near at peace as it can be,
All is peace here, I am satisfied.

In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
The fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day withdraw,
Nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness,
The fresh scent, the peace, the naturalness all around me,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests.
Kindling a fire, falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog by my side,
I sleep—I sleep long—and over the past, oblivion.

Rapt and happy, amid this wild, free scene,
Nature’s amelioration blessing all,
Soothing, bathing, merging all,
Here I realize the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone.

But am I alone?
How is it that in all the serenity and lonesomeness of solitude, one is never entirely without the instinct of looking around for somebody to start up out of the earth, or from behind some tree or rock? Seems as if something unknown were possibly lurking in those solitary places. Nay, it is quite certain there is—some vital unseen presence.
(Nature has a keen way of putting its strength out—if a man lack in one sense, nature puts the strength due that sense into another.)

Here I sit absorbing, enjoying all,
With a perfect sense of the oneness of nature,
And the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs.
The things of nature are in the main suggestive and gymnastic, not great because of objects and events themselves, but great in reference to a human personality and for identity, and only thus of any service. For what to you or me is this round universe, with all life’s involv’d and varied pageants of success and failure, except as touching you and me?

Virtue, (said Marcus Aurelius,) what is it? only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with nature;
I like to think it over and over and over again with Epictetus:
What is good for thee, O Nature, is good for me!
That is the foundation on which I build—it is the source of my great peace,
It is so subtle, so finally inevitable.

There is a subtle something in the common earth, crops, cattle, air, trees, etc., and in having to do at first hand with them, that forms the only purifying and perennial element for individuals and for society. The use of finding the great materialistic laws is to make politics, lives, manners, and all plans of the soul no less than they.

Doubtless there comes a time—perhaps it has come to me—when one feels through his whole being, and pronouncedly the emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and nature objectively—the microcosm and macrocosm. For nature consists not only in itself, objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it—faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual. Nature follows close upon the mood of the mind that contemplates her—is moody as it is moody, bright as it is bright, laughs in its laughter, weeps in its tears.

We see the world of materials, nature with all its objects, processes, shows, reflecting the human spirit and by such reflection formulating, identifying, developing, and proving it. If a man always sees himself in nature, it reflects the fashion of his gods and all his religions and politics and books and art and social and public institutions; ignorance or knowledge, kindness or cruelty, grossness or refinement, definitions or chaos—each is unerringly sent back to him or her who curiously gazes.

The mirror that nature holds is deep and floating and ethereal and faithful—
A clean bright mirror, a magical wondrous mirror,
It will show you all you can conceive of, all you wish to behold.

I see my soul reflected in nature—
I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as nature,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual and breeding,
Mystical, nude, affectionate,
Costume manly and free, face sunburnt and bearded,
A face of an unaffected animal,
A face of one who eats and drinks and is a brawny lover and embracer.

I am an open air man—winged,
I am also an open water man—aquatic,
I want to get out, fly, swim.

How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real, is a human being, himself or herself,
As boundless, joyous, and vital as nature itself—
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they.
Do you sometimes feel the earth hunger? the desire for the dirt?
To get outdoors, into the woods, on the roads?
To roll in the grass, to cry out, to play tom fool with yourself in the free fields?
Nature, gently, by her living laws, would stimulate the mind to ever-fresh discoveries, and fresh inventions, which bring serene delight.

Nature is only what is entertainable by the physical conscience, the sense of matter—
Man, comprehending these, has, in towering superaddition, the moral and spiritual consciences, indicating his destination beyond the ostensible, the mortal.
He alone has the quality of understanding and telling how divine a thing an animal is, what life, matter, passion, volition are,
He only can celebrate things, animals, and landscapes.
He is to be the seer of nature,
His mentality is a quality to be used toward things, as his vision is used,
If he depart from animals and things he is lost.

I think everybody loves nature, though he may not know it. No child can be born or brought up but nature’s lessons are brought to bear on him and are absorbed by him.
But there are really very few people who know how to enjoy the country. We seem afraid of nature—not content to take a drink of pure cold water, but must put sugar into it, or a flavor. To me, these things are prominent dangers. It is a pity that folks don’t enjoy themselves in a more free and easy manner.

Nature is naked, and I am also,
Sweet, sane, still nakedness in nature,
Ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity might really know you once more!
The inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body.

Is not nakedness then indecent?
No, not inherently; are we not all naked under our clothes?
There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent,
The innocence and nakedness are resumed; they are neither modest nor immodest.
It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent,
Your stale modesties are filthy to such a man as I.

Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is—no bonds, no dress, no manners, returning to the naked source-life of us all, to the breast of the great silent savage all-acceptive mother. Alas! how many have wander’d so far away, that return is almost impossible.

Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same—to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the loving day, the mounting sun, and the stars of heaven by night, the changes of seasons, the trees, fields, the rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the primitive apples, the pebble-stones.

Come, ye disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left,
Come get the sure virtues of creek-shore, and wood, and field,
It is almost incredible what a little stretch of nature will do to arouse a fellow—convert him, so to speak.

Nature only gives us a little of her territory, her domain, and retains the rest,
Retains it for her own modesties, for reasons of her own.
The orthodox call that waste—
But no, it is something else, something far else.

Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
There are times when nature is bare and ugly,
Do you suppose nature has nothing under those beautiful, terrible, irrational forms?
Be not discouraged, keep on,
Her lessons are well folded and enveloped,
There are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Is nature rude, free, irregular?
If nature be so, do you too be so.
I find in all characters that live close to nature, capriciousness, variability,
They seem to pattern after nature’s higher rules;
A country population in direct contact with natural facts and growths becomes wholesome and pure as nature is.

What is this separate nature so unnatural?
Long have we been absent,
As of the far-back days the poets tell, the Paradiso,
The straying thence, the separation long—
How long we were fooled!
But now the wandering done, the journey done,
Now we return, come home,
Abandon we ourselves to nature’s primal mode again.

Now delicious, transmuted, we swiftly escape, as nature escapes,
We are nature—
We are bedded in the ground,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as any,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey.

The exile returns home, renascent with grossest nature,
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature,
To put rapport the mountains and rocks and streams,
And the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and pine,
With you O soul—
Man and art with nature fused again.

Now I permit to speak, at every hazard, nature without check with original energy,
Singing the true song of the soul fitful at random.
To the rocks I calling sing, and all the trees in the woods,
To the plains, to the far-off sea, and the unseen winds,
In cries, laughter, defiances, thrown from me when alone far in the wilds.

Before the fitting man all nature yields,
The skies, trees, hear his voice,
And responding they answer all, but not in words—
A flutter at the darkness’ edge as if old time’s and space’s near revealing,
Open, voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable, eloquent.

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns—O grass of graves—
If you do not say anything how can I say anything?

O secret of the earth and sky! passage to you!
Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
Of you O woods and fields! O clouds! O rain and snows!
Of you strong mountains of my land! passage to you!
O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you!

Animals and vegetables! if I realize you I have satisfaction,
Laws of the earth and air! if I realize you I have satisfaction,
I cannot define my satisfaction, yet it is so.

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes,
Every acre of the land and sea affords me a hint of the whole spread of nature,
With her eternal unsophisticated freshness, her never-visited recesses of sea, sky, shore.
Gathering these hints, the preludes, from the landscape or waters or from the blue sky,
I must follow up these continual lessons of the air, water, earth—
The profound earth and its attributes and the unquiet ocean, the exquisite apparition of the sky,
Gases and waters, minerals, vegetables, animals, the prairies, pastures, forests, snows,
The grass, the lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves—
I perceive I have no time to lose.

NEXT: IN THE AIR

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).