Published Works

Books by Whitman

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 141] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

EARTH! MY LIKENESS!

EARTH! my likeness!

Though you look so impassive, ample spheric
there,

I now suspect that is not all;

I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eligible
to burst forth;

For an athlete is enamour'd of me—and I of him;

But toward him there is something fierce and terrible
in me, eligible to burst forth,

I dare not tell it in words—not even in these songs.

Distributed under a Creative Commons License. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price, editors.