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Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
 
What is a man, anyhow? What am I? What are you?
 
All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own;
Else it were time lost listening to me.
 
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums, and the ground but wallow and filth;
That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape, and tears.
 
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids
conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d;
I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out.
 
Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
 
Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsell’d with
doctors, and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
 
In all people I see myself—none more, and not one a
barleycorn less;
And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them.
 
And I know I am solid and sound;
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow;
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
 
I know I am deathless;
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass;
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
 
I know I am august;
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood;
I see that the elementary laws never apologize;
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after
all.)
 
I exist as I am—that is enough;
If no other in the world be aware, I sit content;
And if each and all be aware, I sit content.
 
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself;
And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
 
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite;
I laugh at what you call dissolution;
And I know the amplitude of time.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.