ANIMALS - WALT WHITMAN (Poet)
Before you read
The poet tells us that he feels more at home with animals than humans, whom he finds complicated and false.
The poem is taken from ‘Song of Myself ’ in Leaves of Grass.
Poet
Walt Whitman (1819 – 92) is a major figure in early American poetry. In an age when all poetry was rhymed and metrical, Whitman made a break with tradition and wrote a revolutionary new kind of poetry in free verse. He was a nonconformist in all respects, including his social life.
Poem
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK