I Sing the Body Electric

by Walt Whitman

Part 1:

I sing the body electric,


The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,


They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,


And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?


And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?


And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?


And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

1855