The Walt Whitman Archive
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Books by Whitman
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GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN.
1
| GIVE me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling, |
| Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard, |
| Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows, |
| Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape, |
| Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content, |
| Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars, |
| Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturb'd, |
| Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire, |
| Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the world a rural domestic life, |
| Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only, |
| Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities! |
| These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and rack'd by the war-strife,) |
| These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart, |
| While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city, |
View Page 245
| Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets, |
| Where you hold me enchain'd a certain time refusing to give me up, |
| Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich'd of soul, you give me forever faces; |
| (O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries, |
| I see my own soul trampling down what it ask'd for.) |
2
| Keep your splendid silent sun, |
| Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods, |
| Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards, |
| Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum; |
| Give me faces and streets—give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs! |
| Give me interminable eyes—give me women—give me comrades and lovers by the thousand! |
| Let me see new ones every day—let me hold new ones by the hand every day! |
| Give me such shows—give me the streets of Manhattan! |
| Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and drums! |
| (The soldiers in companies or regiments—some starting away, flush'd and reckless, |
| Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;) |
| Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships! |
| O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied! |
| The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me! |
| The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torchlight procession! |
| The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following; |
| People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants, |
| Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now, |
| The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded,) |
| Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! |
| Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me. |