Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman!

On Walt Whitman’s birthday, a little poem:

And who art thou? said I
to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer,
as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth,
said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land
and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d,
altogether changed, and
yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies,
dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only,
latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night,
I give back life to my own origin,
and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place,
after fulfilment, wandering,
Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.