• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Poetry of the 1500s
  • Poetry of the1600s
  • Poetry of the 1700s
  • Poems for Kids
  • War Poems
  • Every Poem

Every Day Poems

A Poem A Day

  • Home
  • Book Publishers
  • Literary Magazines
  • Stories
  • Poems
  • Promote Books
  • Advertise
  • Submit

Walt Whitman–One Hour to Madness and Joy

April 30, 2019 by Every Writer

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin’d man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin’d!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

###

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819-March 26, 1892) is the father of modern poetry.

Filed Under: 1800s Poetry, Whitman, Walt

Primary Sidebar

AD




Search

Latest

I’ve Set Out All of the Traps for Us by Kiara Nicole Letcher

I start to miss you right after you leave
and then at night I feel a deep ache
in that need spot.

The Shaman by Larry D. Thomas

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. He has published several award-winning and critically acclaimed collections of poetry

Now and Then

Phil Huffy writes early and often at his kitchen table, casting a wide net as to form and substance. His work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Schuylkill Valley Review,

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in