Life

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Dies, all dies! The grass it dies, but in vernal rain Up it springs and it lives again; Over and over, again and again It lives, it dies and it lives again.

For a cap and bells our lives we pay, Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking: ’Tis heaven alone that is given away, ’Tis only God may be had for the asking.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

Have you found your life distasteful? My life did and does smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I’ll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again.

You never know what life means till you die: Even throughout life, ’tis death that makes life live, Gives it whatever the significance.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life’s business being just the terrible choice.

The instant made eternity— And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, forever ride?

And see! she stirs! She starts—she moves—she seems to feel The thrill of life along her keel.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime. And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

A little sunburnt by the glare of life.

To rise at six, to dine at ten, To sup at six, to sleep at ten, Makes a man live for ten times ten.

What were we? What was that bitter instant We called life?

So we keep asking, over and over, Until a handful of earth Stops our mouths— But is that an answer?

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is— I hold it towards you.

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.