To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.[1]
O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
A ship itself …
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.[2]
Elsewhere the hymn rises still more rapturously, and ends in a way that reminds one of the beginning of Pascal’s Prière de Jésus:
Women and men in wisdom innocence and health—all joy!
Riotous laughing bacchanals fill’d with joy!
War, sorrow, suffering gone—the rank earth purged—nothing but joy left!
The ocean fill’d with joy—the atmosphere all joy!
Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!
Enough to merely be! enough to breathe!
Joy! joy! all over joy![3]
In this case the Dionysiac and Nietzschean exultation mingles with the universal optimism of Whitman, and in a certain sense purifies it. But the American prophet suggests the German poet in another respect also: in his pride. Whitman loves to call himself “more vain than modest,” and reveals himself “proud of his pride”—
