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What Am I After All by Walt Whitman

By T.

1 January 2013

3.78k

What Am I After All
Walt Whitman

What am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over;
I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.

To you, your name also;
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?

MARGINALIA

It is past midnight. Hello, new year. Hello, self. I raise my head and look at the sky. I say my name. Once. Twice. Again. I say, here. Here.

What am I, after all? Another speck in the universe. Beginning again. Here.

ABOUT WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson. This… (more)