SPONTANEOUS me, Nature,
The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,
The hill-side whitend with blossoms of the mountain ash,
The same, late in autumnthe hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark
green,
The rich coverlid of the grassanimals and birdsthe private untrimmd
bankthe primitive applesthe pebble-stones,
Beautiful dripping fragmentsthe negligent list of one after another, as I happen to
call them to me, or think of them,
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry,
(Know, once for all, avowd on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty,
lurking, masculine poems;)
Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,
Arms and hands of lovelips of lovephallic thumb of lovebreasts of
lovebellies pressd and glued together with love,
Earth of chaste lovelife that is only life after love,
The body of my lovethe body of the woman I lovethe body of the manthe
body of the earth,
Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,
The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and downthat gripes the full-grown
lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds
himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied,
The wet of woods through the early hours,
Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down
across and below the waist of the other,
The smell of apples, aromas from crushd sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,
The boys longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming,
The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl, and falling still and content to the ground,
The no-formd stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,
The hubbd sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any one,
The sensitive, orbic, underlappd brothers, that only privileged feelers may be
intimate where they are,
The curious roamer, the hand, roaming all over the bodythe bashful withdrawing of
flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge themselves,
The limpid liquid within the young man,
The vexed corrosion, so pensive and so painful,
The tormentthe irritable tide that will not be at rest,
The like of the same I feelthe like of the same in others,
The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that flushes and flushes,
The young man that wakes, deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master
him;
The mystic amorous nightthe strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingersthe young man all
colord, red, ashamed, angry;
The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,
The merriment of the twin-babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never
turning her vigilant eyes from them,
The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripend long-round walnuts;
The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,
The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and
animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent;
The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,
The oath of procreation I have swornmy Adamic and fresh daughters,
The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate what shall produce
boys to fill my place when I am through,
The wholesome relief, repose, content;
And this bunch, pluckd at random from myself;
It has done its workI tossed it carelessly to fall where it may.
Spontaneous Me.
written byWalt Whitman
© Walt Whitman