Walt Whitman on the garden

Fenix, tree, and car (West Texas: June 20, 2010 3:28:40pm CST)

TO THE GARDEN THE WORLD

To the garden the world anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for

reasons, most wondrous,

Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.
— Walt Whitman in the beginning of his poem “Children of Adam” in Leaves of Grass: Including Sands at Seventy, Good Bye My Fancy Old Age Echoes, and A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1904), p. 79. First published (Brooklyn, New York: 1855).