The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)

You express me better than I can express myself, You shall be more to me than my poem.

They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted, None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.

To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it, To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens, To take to your use out of

Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious years each emerging from that which preceded it,

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days, Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood,