I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland – I mark the long winters and the isolation.
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love.
My respiration and inspiration... the beating of my heart... the passing of blood and air through my lungs, the sniff of green leaves and dry leaves and of the short and dark colored sea-rocks and of hay in the barn... the delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides, the feeling of health... the full moon trill... the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts. One brief house of madness and joy!
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life, Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you.
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content.
I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;.
Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise.
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
Great is life... and real and mystical... wherever and whoever, Great is death... Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together; Sure as the stars return again after they merge on the light, death is as great as life.
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall, I swear to you they will understand you and justify you, The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all and is faithful to all, He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you are not an iota less than they, You shall be fully glorified in them.
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.
O baffled, baulked, bent to the very earth, Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that, amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my insolent poems, the real ME stands yet untouched, untold, altogether unreached, Withdrawn.
It is that something in the soul which says, – Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night; I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close barebosomed night! Press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds! Night of the large few stars! Still nodding night! Mad naked summer night! Smile.
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
The souls moving along... are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible?
And that my Soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful.
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?