Read "Voices" by Walt Whitman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
1. Now I make a leaf of Voices -- for I have found nothing mightier than they are, / And I have found that no word spoken but is beautiful in its place.
2. O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices? / Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow, / As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around / the globe.
All waits for the right voices; / Where is the practised and perfect organ? Where is the developed Soul? / For I see every word uttered thence has deeper, sweeter, new sounds, / impossible on less terms.
I see brains and lips closed -- tympans and temples unstruck, / Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose, / Until that comes which has the quality to bring forth what lies slumbering, / for ever ready, in all words.