T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
I Sing the Body Electric
By Walt Whitman (1819–1892)(From Leaves of Grass, 1860) I HAVE perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,* * * * * | |
| To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, | |
| To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, | |
| To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? | |
| I do not seek any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. | 5 |
| There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, | |
| All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. | |
| This is the female form, | |
| A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, | |
| It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction! | 10 |
| I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, | |
| Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, the atmosphere and the clouds, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed, | |
| Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, | |
| Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, | |
| Ebb stung by the flow and flow, stung by the ebb, love flesh swelling and deliciously aching, | 15 |
| Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white blow and delirious juice, | |
| Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn; | |
| Undulating into the willing and yielding day, | |
| Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day. | |
| This is the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman, | 20 |
| This is the bath of birth, this is the merge of small and large, and the outlet again. | |
| Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, | |
| You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul. | |
| The female contains all qualities and tempers them, she is in her place and moves with perfect balance, | |
| She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active, | 25 |
| She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters. | |
| As I see my soul reflected in Nature, | |
| As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness and beauty, | |
| See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see. * * * * * | |