Welcome back to the Poem of the Month. The sun has finally begun to return to the Pacific Northwest, bringing with it blooming flowers, the long-absent cacophony of singing birds outside my window. This month’s poem by Walt Whitman celebrates the introspection and dawning awareness of our faith in the universe, and ourselves as individuals. I guess it’s not so much a song of awakening or epiphanies, but of acknowledgement of simple truths that build a holistic view of the world, the universe, our individual’s place within it. Perhaps, it is a collective perspective of life that allows the poet his ability to momentarily transcend himself and produce the kind of art that reaches out to touch us deep in our soul. But I do not think that it is the poets’ purview alone. It is accessible to us all – every sunrise, every day, every twilight…
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Faith Poem
I need no assurances—I am a man who is
pre-occupied of his own soul;
I do not doubt that whatever I know at a given
time, there waits for me more which I do not
know;
I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside
the hands and face I am cognizant of, are
now looking faces I am not cognizant of —
calm and actual faces;
I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the
world is latent in any iota of the world;
I do not doubt there are realizations I have
no idea of, waiting for me through time
and through the universes—also upon this
earth;
I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the uni-
verses are limitless—in vain I try to think
how limitless;
I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of
orbs, play their swift sports through the air
on purpose—and that I shall one day be
eligible to do as much as they, and more than
they;
I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities,
insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds,
rejected refuse, than I have supposed;
I do not doubt there is more in myself than I have
supposed—and more in all men and women
—and more in my poems than I have
supposed;
I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and
on, millions of years;
I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and
exteriors have their exteriors—and that the
eye-sight has another eye-sight, and the hear-
ing another hearing, and the voice another
voice;
I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths
of young men are provided for—and that the
deaths of young women, and the deaths of
little children, are provided for;
I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter
what the horrors of them—no matter whose
wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone
down—are provided for, to the minutest
point;
I do not doubt that shallowness, meanness, malig-
nance, are provided for;
I do not doubt that cities, you, America, the
remainder of the earth, politics, freedom,
degradations, are carefully provided for;
I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen,
any where, at any time, is provided for, in
the inherences of things.
