From the Bin: Piety and Conformity

I suppose I loved this when I was a teen-ager. It holds up pretty well today. And it is oddly apt in its specifity: Lake Ontario can indeed be blue, and bracing:

Piety and conformity to them that like,
Peace, obesity, allegiance to them that like …

I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning everyone I meet,
Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

--Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.”