Daily Whitman

As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

 2
  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  Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,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.