20
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?
All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,Else it were time lost listening to me.
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.
Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
I know I am solid and sound,To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless,I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
I know I am august,I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,I see that the elementary laws never apologize,(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough,If no other in the world be aware I sit content,And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,I laugh at what you call dissolution,And I know the amplitude of time.