Classic Poem

I NOW , Walt Whitman,
In the twenty-fifth year of my wandering with invisible footstep
Raising no dust in the green paths of heaven,
More alive now than I was in Camden, more so even than in Manhattan,
Come from knitting with gossamer windings the hearts of many who love me,
Finding me uninvited an intruder into their chambers
Never again to be banished—
I alive now, happy, rejoicing in manhood and in the increasing manliness and tenderness of lovers,
Salute you, who thought I could lie still and not remember
The flesh and the body, the roughs as well as the gentle,
(As if when a man has written a book, he will never start in on another,
And as if I had not spoken the truth when I told them I should not lie still in my coffin,
But should be continually out on the open road).

I have published myself many times since I left the old rocker,
And many have thought that what they had written had something within it,
But few have acknowledged whose hand has been laid on their shoulder.
Here in the West, born of the sun and the prairie,
Like myself in many things, tenderness, courage, devotion, knowing some things that I knew not,
Yet lacking in wisdom—humble, though, and yielding with perfect faith to my guidance,
(He himself could not say these things, but I can say them),
He I have chosen is setting in words not so resistless as mine were,
Still with a witness of earnest about them.

Come, now, ye who have sworn by my pages, making out of my frankness a cult that I never intended,
Fearing the open, lurking in pestilent cities, and hectic with milling together,
In what was purest and manliest in me finding excuse for your ordure,
With delicate fingers picking my body to pieces,
Have done, I disown you!
My most undeniable message.

The perfect body singing its ample justification,
The open-handed candor of the dawn seen through the interlacing pine-trees:
I take the road, but leave my staff behind.