Poems by Walt Whitman

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Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
but you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! For you must justify me.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness,
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you
And then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

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O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean,
of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! So sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?
[Answer] That you are here - that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

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Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.