Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. BELIEVE YOURSELF A WHOLE, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. BELIEVE YOURSELF A WHOLE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Believe yourself a whole
Last Line: And made for love—to embrace all, to be united ultimately with all.
Subject(s): Ontology; Being


BELIEVE yourself a Whole.
These needs, these desires, these faculties—
This of eating and drinking, the great pleasure of food the need of
sex-converse and of renewal in and from the bodies of others;
The faculty of sight, the wonderful panorama of the visible, and of
hearing;
The inquisitive roaming brain, the love of society and good fellowship;
The joy of contest, the yearnings of Religion, the mystic impulses of
night, of Nature, of solitude;
All these and a thousand other impulses, capacities, determinations, are
indeed Yourself—the output and evidence and delineation of Yourself.
They cannot (in any permanent sense) be peeled off and thrown away;
They spring inevitably deep down out of yourself—and will recur again
wherever you are.
There is no creature in the whole range of Being from the highest to the
lowest which does not exhibit these and similar capacities, or the germs of
them, in itself.
You are that Whole which Nature also is—and yet you are that Whole in
your own peculiar way.
Were your eyes destroyed, still the faculty of sight were not destroyed:
Out of the same roots again as before would the optic apparatus spring.
Should you die of starvation you would only begin immediately after death
to take food in another way; and the impulse of union which is at the base of
sex lies so deep down that the first reawakening of consciousness would restore
it.

Believe yourself a Whole, indivisible, indefeasible—
Reawakening ever under these, under those, conditions—
Expanding thus far, expanding less far, expanding farther
Expanding this side, expanding that side, expanding all sides;
Ever diverse yet the same, the same yet diverse—inexhaustibly
continuous with the rest;
And made for love—to embrace all, to be united ultimately with all.





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