| WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, | |
| I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; | |
| Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, | |
| Your true Soul and Body appear before me, | |
| They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. | 5 |
| |
| Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; | |
| I whisper with my lips close to your ear, | |
| I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. | |
| |
| O I have been dilatory and dumb; | |
| I should have made my way straight to you long ago; | 10 |
| I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. | |
| |
| I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; | |
| None have understood you, but I understand you; | |
| None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; | |
| None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; | 15 |
| None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; | |
| I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. | |
| |
| Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; | |
| From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; | |
| But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; | 20 |
| From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. | |
| |
| O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! | |
| You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; | |
| Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; | |
| What you have done returns already in mockeries; | 25 |
| (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) | |
| |
| The mockeries are not you; | |
| Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; | |
| I pursue you where none else has pursued you; | |
| Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; | 30 |
| The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, | |
| The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. | |
| |
| There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; | |
| There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; | |
| No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; | 35 |
| No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. | |
| |
| As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; | |
| I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. | |
| |
| Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! | |
| These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; | 40 |
| These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; | |
| These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, | |
| Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. | |
| |
| The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; | |
| Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; | 45 |
| Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; | |
| Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way. | |
