Poem For Sunday

by Zoe Pollock

Walt Whitman does humility like no one else; the entire poem is like walking into the ocean and immersing yourself in something greater. Here, an excerpt from "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life:"

As I wend to the shores I know not,

As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
        have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
        untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
        bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
        object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
        upon me and sting me,

Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.