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