So far so well,
I have written enough to weary myself, and I will dispatch it to the printers, and cease,
But how much—how many topics, of the greatest point and cogency, I am leaving untouch’d,
I feel a hundred realities, clearly determined in me, that words are not yet formed to represent.

So I sing the unaccomplished,
Always unfinished—always incompleted,
The paths to the house are made—but where is the house itself?
At most only indicated or touched,
The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.  

There is that in me—I do not know it,
It is without name—it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol,
The secret and the solving still are hidden.
The most and the best of the poem I perceive remains unwritten,
The best yet left, unexpress’d and lacking,
When I undertake to tell the best I find I cannot,
I become a dumb man, my tongue is ineffectual on its pivots.

Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,
Indeed, what does it all amount to, this saying business?
The greatest of thoughts and truths are never put in print, for the real depths elude us,
Aught of real perfection, or the solution of any deep problem—
Or any completed statement of the moral, the true, the beautiful—
Eludes the greatest, deftest poet,
Flies away like an always uncaught bird;
After the countless songs, or long or short, all tongues, all lands,
Still something not yet told in poesy’s voice or print—something lacking.  

In what is written or said forget not that silence is also expressive—for in manners, poems, orations, friendship, authorship, what is not said is just as important as what is said, and holds just as much meaning. Often it is the things unsaid, rather than the things said, that give importance to speech, to life. I sometimes ask myself: Have not I too said this or that, where silence would have been better, honester?

Great is expression—great is silence,
Anguish as hot as the hottest and contempt as cold as the coldest may be without words,
The greatest anguish is the misery that neither weeps nor complains,
The greatest contempt utters not a single word;
After all there is in eloquence and rage, I guess there is more still in silence.

I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best,
I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold,
I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,
It is always to leave the best untold.

I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
I get humors—they come over me—emotional revolts against words—
God damn them, words, even the words I myself utter—
Wondering if anything was ever done worthwhile except in the final silences, the untellable,
The wonder, the delight, of the silences—
How lucky is the man who doesn’t say things!

NEXT:  THE POET’S CRAFT

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).