Shut Not Your Doors, &c.

Walt Whitman

   SHUT not your doors to me, proud libraries,
   For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet
         needed most, I bring;
   Forth from the army, the war emerging--a book I have made,
   The words of my book nothing--the drift of it everything;
   A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the intellect,
   But you, ye untold latencies, will thrill to every page;
   Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the flowing, eternal
         Identity,
   To Nature, encompassing these, encompassing God--to the joyous,
         electric All,
   To the sense of Death--and accepting, exulting in Death, in its turn,
         the same as life,
   The entrance of Man I sing.                                        10

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