T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
From Pent-up Aching Rivers
By Walt Whitman (18191892)(From Leaves of Grass, 1860) FROM pent-up aching rivers, | |
From that of myself, without which I were nothing, | |
From what I am determin’d to make illustrious, even if I stand sole among men, | |
From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus, | |
Singing the song of procreation. | 5 |
Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people, | |
Singing the muscular urge and the blending, | |
Singing the bedfellow’s song, (O resistless yearning! | |
O for any and each, the body correlative attracting! | |
O for you, whoever you are, your correlative body! O it, more than all else, you delighting!) | 10 |
From the hungry gnaw that eats me night and day, | |
From native moments, from bashful pains, singing them, | |
Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it many a long year, | |
Singing the true song of the soul fitful at random, | |
Singing what, to the Soul, entirely redeemed her, the faithful one even the prostitute, who detained me when I went to the city; | 15 |
Singing the song of prostitutes; | |
Renascent with grossest Nature or among animals, | |
Of that, of them and what goes with them my poems informing, | |
Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds, | |
Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves, | 20 |
Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land, I them chanting, | |
The overture lightly sounding, the strain anticipating, | |
The welcome nearness, the sight of the perfect body, | |
The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back lying and floating, | |
The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous, aching, | 25 |
The divine list for myself, or you or for any one, making, | |
The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot, and what it arouses, | |
The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment, | |
(Hark close and still what I now whisper to you, | |
I love you, O you entirely possess me, | 30 |
O I wish that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless, | |
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea, not more lawless than we;) | |
The furious storm through me careering, I passionately trembling, | |
The oath of inseparableness of two together, of the woman that loves me and whom I love more than my life, that oath swearing, | |
(O I willingly stake all for you, | 35 |
O let me be lost if it must be so! | |
O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think? | |
What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust each other if it must be so;) | |
From the master, the pilot I yield the vessel to, | |
The general commanding me, commanding all, from him permission taking, | 40 |
From time the programme hastening, (I have loiter’d too long as it is,) | |
From sex, from the warp and from the woof, | |
(To talk to the perfect girl who understands me, | |
To waft to her these from my own lips—to effuse them from my own body;) | |
From privacy, from frequent repinings alone, | 45 |
From plenty of persons near and yet the right person not near, | |
From the soft sliding of hands over me and thrusting of fingers through my hair and beard, | |
From the long sustain’d kiss upon the mouth or bosom, | |
From the close pressure that makes me or any man drunk, fainting with excess, | |
From what the divine husband knows, from the work of fatherhood, | 50 |
From exultation, victory and relief, from the bedfellow’s embrace in the night, | |
From the act-poems of eyes, hands, hips and bosoms, | |
From the cling of the trembling arm, | |
From the bending curve and the clinch, | |
From side by side the pliant coverlet off-throwing, | 55 |
From the one so unwilling to have me leave, and me just as unwilling to leave, | |
(Yet a moment O tender waiter, and I return,) | |
From the hour of shining stars and dropping dews, | |
From the night a moment I emerging flitting out, | |
Celebrate you act divine—and you children prepared for, | 60 |
And you, stalwart loins. | |