Archive for December 27th, 2013

Whitman on Romeo

Friday, December 27th, 2013

Read Whitman and think Romeo.  Broken hip, starving, in constant danger and yet no complaints.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

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.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their
possession.

I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

If we looked at Nature this way, we just might be able to live with each other.  Have we negligently lost our tokens and our way?