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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Walt Whitman
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from https://www.rd.com/list/love-poems/
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
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.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Considered one of the most influential poems ever written, “Song of Myself” by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is, as its title suggests, a celebration of the metaphysical self. Whitman’s narrator takes in the beautiful sensory imagery around him, examining its relationship to his own body and the life that courses through it. And although it’s not a poem about love in the romantic sense, it’s a poem about self-love. After all, we cannot truly love others without first loving ourselves.
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