I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC . . .

What music those words evoke in my mind . . .

For years I thought that Ray Bradbury was their originator. His book of short stories balanced beautifully on those enticing notes, especially the title story. (It became a television movie, The Electric Grandmother - not nearly as poetic.)

But they are from Walt Whitman's ode to the wonders of the body human by the same name, in Leaves of Grass.

Is it surprising then, that as I read on I noticed many of the same harmonies in both book and poem? No.

Writers read.
Good writers read a lot.

I firmly believe that whatever your vocation, or avocation, it can only be bettered by reading.

Here is a taste. Follow the link for the complete text.

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?