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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman is the author of Leaves of Grass...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Difficult Love
A Love Song
by William Carlos Williams, read by Ron Silliman
Amorosa Erranza
by Julian T. Brolaski
Anna, Thy Charms
by Robert Burns
Be Near Me
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Caboose Thoughts
by Carl Sandburg
Demon and The Dove
by Miguel Murphy
Designer Kisses
by Major Jackson
Dregs
by César Vallejo
Enemies
by Dante Micheaux
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder
by A. E. Housman
How Much?
by Carl Sandburg
I Am Not Yours
by Sara Teasdale
I Do Not Love Thee
by Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton
I have lived in your face
by Jean Valentine
I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I'm A Fool To Love You
by Cornelius Eady
Last Words to Miriam
by D. H. Lawrence
Love
by Katy Lederer
Love in Fantastique Triumph satt
by Aphra Behn
Love's Secret
by William Blake
Loving and Beloved
by Sir John Suckling
My Love Sent Me a List
by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Never give all the heart
by W. B. Yeats
Not
by Sophie Cabot Black
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
Opal
by Amy Lowell
Our Bed Is Also Green
by Joshua Bell
Passer Mortuus Est
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Pericardium
by Joanna Klink
Poetry Anonymous
by Prageeta Sharma
Prayer
by Robert Glück
Red and Blue Planets
by Joni Wallace
Sometimes with One I Love
by Walt Whitman
Sonnet 102 [If no love is, O God, what fele I so?]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 12 [Alas, so all things now do hold their peace]
by Petrarch
Talking to Patrizia
by Kenneth Koch
The Barrier
by Claude McKay
The Flight
by Sara Teasdale
The Heart Breaking
by Abraham Cowley
The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden, read by Nick Laird
The Peace That So Lovingly Descends
by Noelle Kocot
The Unloved to His Beloved
by William Alexander Percy
They Romp with Wooly Canines
by Patricia Smith
They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century
by Maureen N. McLane
This Deepening Takes Place Again
by Emily Kendal Frey
To A Sea-Cliff
by Thomas Hardy
To His Coy Love
by Michael Drayton
UTOPIA: Love as Free as a Fountain
by Joe Hall
What Do I Care
by Sara Teasdale
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand
by Walt Whitman
Witch-Wife
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
[I Failed Him and He Failed Me]
by Katie Ford
Related Prose
An Anatomy of the Long Poem
by Rachel Zucker
Walt Whitman Poetfan: Jan Freeman
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Song of Myself, XI

 
by Walt Whitman

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long
   hair,
Little streams pass'd over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended trembling from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun,
   they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with the pendant and bending
   arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.






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