by Whitman · Cluster: Identity · Free Verse · Eternal Return
Abstract
Confessional identification of the poet with felons, convicts, and prostitutes, refusing to deny the lusts and wickedness in himself; the outcast, guilt, the body, and social compassion.
Connections
Archetypes: Outsider Themes & Concepts: Guilt, Body, Sin and the Fall, Social Injustice, Self
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: AUTUMN RIVULETS
You felons on trial in courts, You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain’d and handcuff’d with iron, Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison? Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain’d with iron, or my ankles with iron?
You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs or obscene in your rooms, Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself?
O culpable! I acknowledge—I expose! (O admirers, praise not me—compliment not me—you make me wince, I see what you do not—I know what you do not.)
Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch’d and choked, Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell’s tides continually run, Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me, I walk with delinquents with passionate love, I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?