Song of Myself

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,

My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,

Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between

ancient and modern,

Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five

thousand years,

Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting

the sun,

Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with

sticks in the circle of obis,

Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,

Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt

and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,

Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas

admirant, minding the Koran,

Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and

knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,

Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified,

knowing assuredly that he is divine,

To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting

patiently in a pew,

Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like

till my spirit arouses me,

Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement

and land,

Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.

One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk

like a man leaving charges before a journey.

Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,

Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd,

atheistical,

I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt,

despair and unbelief.

How the flukes splash!

How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts

of blood!

Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,

I take my place among you as much as among any,

The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,

And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all

precisely the same.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,

But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

Each who passes is consider'd, each who stops is consider'd,

not a single one can it fail.

It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,

Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,

Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew

back and was never seen again,

Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it

with bitterness worse than gall,

Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,

Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd, nor the brutish

koboo call'd the ordure of humanity,

Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to

slip in,

Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of

the earth,

Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of

myriads that inhabit them,

Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.