WALT WHITMAN AT CONVENTION TIME

On my way to bed tonight, for some odd reason I suddenly had the urge to post some of my favorite lines from Walt Whitman, I suppose it was a side effect of reading about the Republican Convention, all that righteousness oozing from patriotic shirkers... anyway, it took me a lot longer than I'd expected, because when I went to do a quick search for the lines on Google, almost every site I could find had whitebreaded Walt's words to just this morsel:

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self - contain'd,

A very few sites continued to this line:

I stand and look at them long and long.

It took me a while to find the tacitly censored rest of it, the passion of it, the point of it, the Walt of it:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Walt would never have been a Republican.

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