Home ⇒ 📌Walt Whitman ⇒ Shut Not Your Doors, &c
Shut Not Your Doors, &c
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.
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