I arise and pass.

* * * * *

With struggles and strange exhausting birth-leapings, with long intervals of sleep,

[When it is all over, with long long sweet sleep;]

With the unwashed wet of birth, of love, still upon me;

With the clinging of the love of men and women, with the sweat of night-long companions, with the bruised sweetness of love;

With sleep, sleep, with the wine of life and death, with kisses given and received, with the reaching of arms round neck and shoulder, and the answer of quiet eyes;

With nakedness unashamed, with divine comradeship, and laughter; with the enclosing shadow of Death, far lost in daring outposts on the verge of the Unknown; with soldiership and armor unremitted, exultant;

With childhood and the least trifle content; with eternal Nowness; with perfected Carelessness; with night, day, rain, sun, winter, summer, morning, evening, solitude, pain, pleasure, and the looking forth of innumerable faces;

With Chastity and Ascendancy; with invulnerability and superhuman power; with Unchastity and Effusion; with live clinging threads of love reaching down to the remotest time;

With the endless journey begun; with trades by sea and land; simple food, coarse clothing, common features; with the breath of the common air, and the freemasonry of the old crafts all over the world;

Shaggy coat-shakings, revolts, rejections of accepted things, travels, disappearances, re-appearances, swoonings away, oblivions; arising again on earth, irresistible, to supreme mastery,

To Savagery and the wild woods, with unfettered step; to rocks and hanging branches; to the dens of the animals, to wind and sun, blowing shining through, and I through them, to evade and arise;

With joy over the world, Democracy, born again, into heaven, over the mountain-peaks and the seas in the unfathomable air, screaming, with shouts of joy, whirling the nations with her breath, into heaven arising and passing,

I arise and pass—dreaming the dream of the soul’s slow disentanglement.