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Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman
Selected, with Introduction by Ernest Rhys
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THE POEMS OF WALT WHITMAN [SELECTED] WITH INTRODUCTION BY ERNEST RHYS. LONDON: Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane Paternoster Row, AND NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE. 1886. ___________
WHEN the true poet comes, how shall we know him— By what clear token,—manners, language, dress?
Or shall a voice from Heaven speak and show him: Him the swift healer of the Earth's distress!
Tell us that when the long-expected comes At last, with mirth and melody and singing,
We him may greet with banners, beat of drums, Welcome of men and maids, and joy-bells ringing;
And, for this poet of ours,
Laurels and flowers.
Thus shall ye know him—this shall be his token: Manners like other men, an unstrange gear;
His speech not musical, but harsh and broken Shall sound at first, each line a driven spear;
For he shall sing as in the centuries olden, Before mankind its earliest fire forgot;
Yet whoso listens long hears music golden. How shall ye know him? ye shall know him not
Till ended hate and scorn,
To the grave he's borne.
—RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
The Century Magazine, November 1881.
___________ "Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!"
LONG ago were tenderly bequeathed by the greatest spirit who ever moved on earth—and, may we not say, the greatest poet?—an obscure young man of divine presence, whose soul was as a clear flame of truth in a dark and haunted night, two precepts to his disciples. The first of the two, understood amiss, travestied by men to inglorious ends of caste and worldly advancement, was fatally separated from its fellow more and more in the after theories of religion. The second, which, in use, has been so grandly named the Golden Rule, though always potent for love and human fellowship, has in the perfect meaning the
Christ gave to it been often sorrowfully lost to us. All along it has, like its fellow, been in its full purity more of the sacred instinct of the few pure hearts than of the many. But now, more than ever, in the surge and fret of later time, when its need is inestimably greater, its spirit seems often lost and perverted, while the letter of its tradition is being told and retold with unlimited unction. To restore this spirit to heroic and active influence among men were a poet's work worthy of the highest, and it is this which is the most immediate significance of the "task eternal, and the burden and the lesson," which Walt Whitman has taken up, —this, perhaps, the most dominant aspect for us in England to-day of Walt Whitman's work as a poet. In point of pure humanity, then, this new song
of America is most significant for us. But if stress is laid on Leaves of Grass as a new poetry of love and comradeship at this time of social mis- giving, when rich and poor alike make us keenly feel the need of the spirit of human love, the poetic force and quality Walt Whitman brings to aid him in his task must not be overlooked. It is not senti- mental valley of the rose and nightingale,—no moonlit dreamland of romance,—whence he draws his inspiration. His poems, whatever critics may say of their art-form and harmonies, are touched with a wider spirit, and in their sweeping music take in the whole scope of Time and Space open to the modern mind. So, if the command was laid upon Walt Whitman to sing "the life-long love of comrades," which is the song of the new Demo- cracy, it was his, too, to first essay the vaster
harmony still of the far-stretched universe as modernly known. The conjunction of this greatness of poetic vision, fearlessly equal to the far range of later science, with the most intimate sympathy with the individual human heart, is what makes Whitman so powerfully suggestive to the younger minds of to-day. In his hopeful gaze into the future, the doubts and misgivings of the time are laid at rest; as he sings of the new, purer Democracy, the social distempers and miseries of this particular hour lose their finality of woe, and are seen to be but a passing stride in the eternal human march.
"One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
. . . . . . .
Of life immense in passion, pulse and power,
Cheerful, for freest action, form'd under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing."
The Modern Man! whom most of us are afraid to approach in poetry, or from any high standpoint at all,—Walt Whitman has resolutely faced him, and sounded the hopes and fears of his potential being. The foregoing passage from "Inscriptions," poems introductory to the main body of the Leaves of Grass, may be called indeed the key-note of Walt Whitman's unusual music. Struck thus at the outset, it will be found dominant throughout the book; with it sounding insistently in our ears we shall not be likely to mistake the great intention of this new poetry. The best way to approach a poet is through his
personality; it is only true poets who can bear to be so approached. In attempting to get at the
bearing upon our day and generation of Walt Whitman as a poet, we must first of all make friends with him as a man, for soon it is found that his life and personality are absolutely one with his poetry. It is impossible, indeed, to thoroughly apprehend the Leaves of Grass without knowing and being thrilled by the magnetic individuality that informs them throughout. And Walt Whitman has not stinted the American people of opportunity to see and know him familiarly; his life has been a remark- ably open and undisguised one from the first. Visiting him now in his quiet home in Camden, New Jersey, one would find a white-haired vener- able man of sixty-six, but it is the Walt Whitman of thirty years back whom one must realise, as he was when, in his prime of manhood and poetic power, he began to write the Leaves of Grass:—
"I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease no till death."
Judged by the conventional good-society standard
of appearance, it is to be feared that Walt Whit- man would have then seemed an alarmingly natural sort of being, just as his poetry judged by approved rhymster's rules seems particularly audacious. There is a description by W. D. O'Connor, written ten years later it is true, but which will help us to realise his presence better perhaps than anything else. It is to be found in O'Connor's well-known essay, "The Good Gray Poet":— "For years past thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in Wash- ington, have seen, even as I saw two hours ago, tallying,
one might say, the streets of our American cities, and fit to have for his background and accessories their streaming populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking masculine beauty—a poet—powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm, superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people; resembling and generally taken by strangers for some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise, with nochalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wear was, when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his hand; rich light an artist would have chosen lay upon his uncovered head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. I marked the countenence, serene, proud, cheer- ful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that fulness of arch seldom seen save in the antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very grey, and tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing in its perfect health and vigour, the august charm of the strong." This depicture of Walt Whitman is valuable as being a direct portrayal, taken on the spot as it were, and showing the magnetic effect of his personal presence, affecting those who came in contact with him to an extraordinary degree, so that indeed it may be that they became poets in their turn, and somewhat idealistic in their accounts. Dr. Maurice Bucke in his vivid book upon Whitman tells
of a certain young man who went to see the poet— being already familiar with Leaves of Grass—and who by means of only a casual and ordinary talk was filled with a strange physical and spiritual exaltation, which lasted some weeks; what is still more impressive, however, it is added that the young fellow's whole tenour of life was altered by this slight contact,—and that his character, outer life, and entire spiritual being were elevated and purified in a very remarkable way. This might seem exaggerated, but this special amount is attested beyond the suspicion even of exaggeration, and it is typical, it will be found, of Walt Whitman's native influence and stimulus throughout. We have the direct testimony of many men of genius to prove this. From the involuntary tribute of Abraham Lincoln,—"Well, he looks like a Man!"—to the more conscious homage of John Burroughs, the poet-naturalist, whose little books of nature we have most of us been reading lately in their charming Edinburgh reprint, all sorts of conditions of men indeed have given their word for him To get at the full bearing of his life upon his
poems, however, let us return to the very begin- ning, and trace, briefly at least, his boyhood and youth. In his Specimen Days and Collect, an autobiographical volume of incomparable prose- notes, as well as in many of the poems, Walt Whitman refers constantly to the great influence of his early childish days in their free open-air environment upon his mental and spiritual growth. He was, indeed, wonderfully happy in his early surroundings,—in his vigorous healthy parentage
and home influences. Born on Long Island, or Paumanok, its Indian name, by which he always calls it, in the State of New York, of a stalward race of farmers, in 1819, the freedom of sun and wind was his, in a wide country-side, with rising hills around, and the sea that he has sung so affectionately, with such deep sympathy, so that its harmonies seem to have subtly informed his poetry, close by. Some of the early pages in Specimen Days give a delightful and vivid descrip- tion of these boyish haunts, and the old home- stead of the Whitmans and the Val Velsors —his mother's family—as visited after more than forty years' absence. A note by John Burroughs, describing briefly the house where Walt Whitman was born and bred, says:—"The Whitmans lived in a long storey-and-a-half farm-house, hugely timbered, which is still standing. A great smoke- canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and chimney, formed one end of the house, where rousing wood fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights. . . . I must not forget to mention that both the families were near enough to the sea to behold it from the high places, and to hear in still hours the roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a peculiar sound at night." There is a temptation to quote a great many of Whitman's own notes about the neighbourhood, but only a brief excerpt or two can be given. "The spreading Hempstead plains in the middle of the island," give us one such note of pastoral feeling. "I have often been out on the edges of these plains toward sundown, and can yet recall in fancy the intermin-
able cow-processions, and hear the music of the tin or copper bells clanking far or near, and breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air, and note the sunset." Again and again he touches on the sea with an affection and a truth of description which make these careless jottings unspeakably suggestive. "As I write," he says in one place, "the whole exper- ience comes back to me after the lapse of forty and more years—the soothing rustle of the waves, and the saline smell—boyhood's times, the clam-digging, the creek—the perfume of the sedge meadows— the hay-boat, and the fishing excursions;—or, of later years, little voyages down and out New York bay, in the pilot boats." While still a child his father moved to Brooklyn—then a country-town, thoroughly rural in character—"at that time broad fields and country roads everywhere around," and still within easy reach of the sea. Here his school- days, and his general apprenticeship to life as printer, journalist, magazine-writer, and so on were mainly passed, up to his twentieth year, when he went to New York. A strong, healthy boyhood and youth his seems to have been throughout, out of which the poetic and literary faculty natively grew in a way as unlike the routine academic tradition as well could be. Give a healthy boy books like the Waverly Novels, and the Arabian Nights, in such a life as this, with a suggestive suffi- ciency of mental and physical work, and you have given him what mere formal scholasticism will never accomplish for him, in true poetic insight.
The next twelve years, spent variously in street
and field, in New York, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other cities, with long intervals always of country life in the wide sweep of valley and plain and seashore, during which he sounded the teeming life of the fast-growing United States, may be deemed, say Dr. Bucke, the special preparation-time for the writing of the Leaves of Grass. Although, accordingly, one would like to comment at length upon these years of young manhood, it is unnecessary. The reader will find its true history and illustrations in the poems themselves. In some respects, however, the more detailed accounts possible in prose, given in Specimen Days, casts valuable added light upon this probation-time, and his great zest for certain sides of life. His "passion for ferries," for instance, that finds final outcome in the well-known poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," has a character- istic note. Referring to the Fulton Ferry, curiously identified with his life in Brooklyn and New York, he writes:—"Almost daily I crossed in the boats, often up in the pilot-houses, where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surround- ings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath; the great tides of humanity also, with ever shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day—the hurrying, splashing seat-tides—the changing panorama of steamers . . . the myriads of white-sail'd schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the
marvellously beautiful yachts . . . what refresh- ment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me years ago, and many a time since." In the same way are described experiences of the teeming streets; the omnibuses, and the always typical race, since old English coaches first ran, of drivers; the theatres and their plays and players, and, with special stress, the operas and famous singers, for Whitman was always enthusiastically susceptible to music of all kinds. To this tumultuous wealth of experience succeeds
naturally the preparation, and then at last the publication, of the Leaves of Grass volume, which marks memorably the year 1855. A great deal of the matter found in the present volume has been added since the issue of this first edition—a thin royal octavo, generally described as a quarto, of ninety-four pages; but the significance of Whit- man's departure from the old routine of poetry was marked in it in a way that no further addition could make more striking. It is not strange, therefore, that the book gained scant recogni- tion. It was not until Emerson sent to Walt Whitman what was really his first recognition from the literary world, the now famous letter of greeting, that the book became at all known. A characteristic passage or two from this letter may be given:—"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things,
said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground some- where for such a start. . . . " Of this letter, which was published eventually in the New York Tribune, Dr. Bucke says:—"Though it could not arrest, it did service in partially offsetting the tide of adverse feeling and opinion which overwhelmingly set in against the poet and his book." And in the same chapter he notes:—"The first reception of Leaves of Grass by the world was in fact about as disheartening as it could be. Of the thousand copies of this 1855 edition, some were given away, most of them were lost, abandoned, or destroyed." Of this thousand, however, certain of the copies had a history not noted in this instance, but told to the present writer by William Bell Scott, the well-known painter and poet, who thus became the means of introducing Walt Whitman to the English republic of letters. The summer following the publication of the book, that is in 1856, a man, James Grindrod by name, arrived in Sunderland from the United States, with a stock of American books—surplus copies, remainders, and so on—among which were the copies of Leaves of Grass mentioned. These books he disposed of my a curious system of dealing, called hand-selling, a rough and ready sort of auction, by which an article is first put up at a certain price and then gradually brought down until it finds a purchaser. This unlicensed street auctioneering most of those who are familiar
with north-country town and their market days must have often witnessed, and in this way certain copies of Leaves of Grass fell into the hands of Thomas Dixon—a well-known native of Sunder- land, to whom Ruskin wrote the famous letters ultimately published as "Time and Tide Weare and Tyne." Thomas Dixon in his turn sent three of the copies thus acquired to William Bell Scott, who at once perceiving the unique quality of the book, sent forthwith one copy, which has become in its way historical, to William Michael Rossetti. For this copy gave the germinal suggestion of W. M. Rossetti's volume of ten years later— "Selected Poems by Walt Whitman," which for long well serve as the only representative of the poet in England. It is noteworthy in relation to this episode that Mr. William Bell Scott, who first gave greeting and encourage- ment to another poet, of quite opposite order—a poet of romanticism like Dante Gabriel Rossetti— should act also as the herald of Walt Whitman— poet above everything of the actual, and the higher realism. Further leaves were added to Leaves of Grass
out of the abounding experiences of the years between 1855 and 1862, over which we must leap hastily to the outbreak of the Civil War,—an event of heroic importance in Whitman's life. It was a heroic opportunity indeed, and he used it like a hero, serving with passionate devotedness as a nurse to the wounded. The news of his brother's wound first called him hurriedly to the seat of war, and thus beginning his ministry, he tended
the wounded soldiers with a love and tenderness which with his peculiar invigorative influence had effects sometimes almost miraculous. And as he bore himself in this ordeal of death and horror of blood, so he afterwards sang. No war since rumours of war first began ever had such a record as is to be found in his war-poems, from the stirring "First O Songs for a Prelude," to the final strains,—"Spirit whose work is done," "Adieu O Soldiers," and the beautiful last of the series, "To the leaven'd soil they trod," wherein he tells with such exquisite imaginative suggestion of untying the tent ropes for the last time and letting the freshness of the morning wind, sunned and scented with the restoring scent of grass and all growing things, go blowing through, sweeping away for ever the clinging odours of war and death which had made the air sickly and terrible for so long, while the eye sent its glance with a thrill of escape to the wide, calm sweep of hills and plains in the distant sunlight, instinct with the sentiment of restored peace and beauty. But at the war's end it was not the same robust,
virile man who came out of that hospital tent. "Three unflinching years of work in that terrible suspense and excitement changed him," says Dr. Bucke, "from a young to an old man. Under the constant and intense moral strain to which he was subjected . . . he eventually broke down. The doctors called his complaint "hospital malaria,' and perhaps it was; but that splendid physique was sapped by labour, watching, and still more by the emotions, dreads, deaths, uncertainties of three
years, before it was possible for hospital malaria or any similar cause to overcome it. This illness (the first he ever had in his life), in the hot summer of 1864, he never entirely recovered from —and never will." He hardly gave himself even time for a temporary recovery before returning to his hospital work, between which and his occupation as a clerk in the Government offices he divided his time up to the war's end. There is no need perhaps to dwell here upon the
story of his stupid dismissal from one office by a certain benighted official because of the alleged immorality of Leaves of Grass, though it was this that provoked W. D. O'Connor to his remarkable, if rather combative, manifesto on the poet's behalf, entitled "The Good Grey Poet." This was in 1868. It must be kept in mind, however, that this was only an extreme instance of the social and literary persecution which was levelled at him from the first. "To the pure all things are pure";—it was from this standpoint that Walt Whitman wrote. But there were critics who, instead of meeting with courtesy this poetic attempt to raise noble functions, long ignobly tainted with obscenity, to their true dignity and natural relation in the great scheme of earth and heaven, attacked him with incredible viciousness and rancour. As, however, considerations of Mrs. Grundy have caused the omission of the poems objected to in the present volume, there is no need to dwell further upon the matter here. There are many delightful glimpses to be got in
John Burroughs's Notes, and in his capital little
book, Birds and Poets, as well as from other sources quoted in the Life, of Walt Whitman's way of life in Washington during the following years; until 1873, in fact. In these various notes he is seen facing life with almost the same exu- berant vigour as in the first heat of youth, only tempered a little by the inroads of time and the ill-health incurred in the war. One account speaks of his being seen daily "moving around in the open air, especially fine mornings and evenings, observing, listening to, or socially talking with all sorts of people, policemen, drivers, market men, old women, the blacks, or dignitaries." It con- tinues:—"Altogether, perhaps, the good, grey poet is rightly located here. Our wide spaces, great edifices, the bredth of our landscape, the ample vistas, the splendour of our skies, night and day, with the national character, the memoirs of Washington and Lincoln, and others that might be named, make our city, above all others, the one where he fitly belongs. Walt Whitman is now in his fifty-second year, hearty and blooming, tall, with his white beard and long hair. The older he gets the more cheerful and gay hearted he grows." In spite of light heart and cheery temper his
ill-health increased upon him, and culminated at last in a parylitic seizure, in February 1873, from which he had almost recovered when in May the same year his mother died somewhat suddenly in Camden, New Jersey, in his presence. "That event," says his chronicler, "was a terrible blow to him, and after the occurrence he became much worse. He left Washington for good, and took up
his residence in Camden. . . . And now for several years," it continues, Ihis life hung upon a thread. Though he suffered at times severely, he never became dejected or impatient. It was said by one of his friends that in that combination of illness, poverty, and old age, Walt Whitman has been more grand than in the full vigour of his manhood. For along with illness, pain, and the burden of age, he soon had to bear poverty also." Of his poverty there is no need to say more than that it resulted from traits of generosity and kindliness that a money-making world might call imprudence, but that the poets have conspired in their one-sided way to call human nature. Recovering somewhat as time went by, so he has lived on, up to the present day, taking still the same delight in nature and in men, exploring the old country-sides and visiting new ones, publishing new editions of Leaves of Grass, and issuing, too, the special outcome of these later years, the unique book of prose autobio- graphical jottings already alluded to, Specimen Days and Collect, "the brightest and halest Diary of and Invalid," says Dr. Bucke, "ever written—a book unique in being the expression of strength in infirmity—the wisdom of weakness—so bright and translucent, at once of the earth, earthly, and spiritual as of the sky and stars. Other books of the invalid's room require to be read with the blind's drawn down and the priest on the threshold; but this sick man's chamber is the lane, and by the creek or sea-shore—always with the fresh air and the open sky overhead." Along with Specimen Days were written from
time to time further poems, and added to the previous collection of Leaves of Grass. The latter volume was also revised, and its arrangement unified, certain of the poems which repeated what was also given in others being left out, and the whole re-touched and altered so as to give a certain epic unity that was rather lacking before. This brings us to consider the poems in themselves, and their full bearing in life and in letters. At once, from the first glance at Whitman's poetry, the reader will see that it is utterly, incomparably unlike anything our ordinary rhymesters have accustomed us to. So apparently abrupt a depart- ure in poetic form and diction may at first cause a certain feeling of distrust. But looking closer, it is soon discovered that here is not, as has been alleged with much asseveration, the freak of a writer trying to be eccentric at all hazards, but the genuine outcome of a quite new and vastly extended appre- hension of life and letters. If Walt Whitman had merely come forward with a re-presentment of the ordinary poetaster's topics,—rose-water agonies, drawing-room romances, and so on, such a departure might well be cavilled at. But here comes a poet who has set himself resolutely to deal with the vast developments of the Nineteenth Century, all the teeming life and work of the Americas and of the wider world still, under aspects startlingly different in their scope and tremendous significance to anything the world has known before, and we quarrel with him, forsooth, because he has not expressed himself in elegiacs, or the measures of the time of Queen Elizabeth. In life, in
science, in philosophy, even in religion, let us be liberal. But in poetry:—No! there is safety in conservatism. This is really what it amounts to. A briefest backward glance through the history
of letters teaches another conclusion; constantly, it will be found, the order of poetic expression is changing and developing. But we do not need to make any far historical excursion for light on the subject: the experience of almost every poet will show us the simple rationale of the matter. The first literary instinct of the young writer is always to transcend the traditional means of utter- ance; the conventional forms have lost their vital response to the subject, he feels; they want re-adjusting, renewing. As he goes on he reconciles in time the new need with the old equipment, bringing in as much fresh force and quality as his genius and energy can satisfactorily compass. This achievement of renovated modes of utterance is of course largely dependent upon the new condi- tions of life, and therefore of literary subject-matter, amid which he is placed. But what must be specially remarked, it is not usually from too ardent a renascence of words and their art forms that a writer fails in the translation of life, but usually from his being overawed by tradition. Convention is the curse of poetry, as it is the curse of every- thing else, in which at a second remove the outward show can be made to pass muster for the inward reality. Now, the hastiest glimpse at the conditions under which a poet who has attempted to deal with the whole scope of the new civilisation, and with all that it implies of new science, new philosophy,
and so on, is placed, will show at once that an order of things so vastly different from any order of the past must require a new poetic approach. This new approach Walt Whitman has set himself courageously to accomplish, and whatever exception is taken to the details of his method, there is no young writer, with an eye to the vast human needs of the time, and not hopelessly encumbered with tradition, but will feel, I am sure, that here is at last an initiative, most powerful and intense, which he must after this bear constantly in mind. Poetry of the last few decades in England has
occupied itself mainly with archaic or purely ideal subjects, with specialist experiments in psychology and morbid anatomy, or the familiar stock material of fantasy and sentiment. For these a certain art- glamour, so to speak,—a certain metrical remove, —is required as a rule, which can be best attained, perhaps, by the fine form and dainty colour of rhyming verse. And there will always, let us hope, be those who will continue to supply this artistic poetry, bringing as it does so much inestimable enchantment to the everyday life. Up to the pre- sent it may be that this poetry has fairly satisfied the need of the time,—a time occupied too much with its processes of material civilisation and wealth-acquirement to attend very truly to the ideal. But standing now on the verge of a new era—an era of democratic ascendancy—it may be well to ask ourselves, even in conserva- tive England, whether, seeing the immense poetic need of a time dangerously possessed of new and tremendous forces, this poetry of archaic form and
sentiment is likely to be equal to the hour. We want now a poetry that shall be masterfully con- temporary, of irresistible appeal to the hearts of the people; and this we certainly have not in England to-day. The critic will say in reply at once, But look at Tennyson, look at Browning! And he is right in insisting upon their great claim. But if we ask ourselves, What then is Tennyson's distinctive achievement in poetry? we have to answer, The Idylls of the King: and Browning's? The Ring and the Book. It does not need a prophet to see at once that there is no hope of poems like these,— masterpieces as both of them are in quite different ways—ever really reaching the people at all. So with their poetry throughout; with all its human feeling and imagination, one feels that it is of ease and refinement. While the wider audience of the people has been vastly increasing, it seems as if the poets had been turning away from it more and more since the time of Burns. It is a far cry from Burns,—even from Wordsworth,—to Tennyson and Browning. It may seem that a dangerous comparison has
been invited in these instances, but it is one that must be faced straightforwardly. The name of Burns suggests a solution of the whole matter. He at any rate sang out of an abounding sympathy with, and knowledge of, the popular need of his day,— "Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives."
In his songs he relied not only upon the great
elementary passions and sentiments of men for his inspiration, but also upon the natural idiom of speech and the music in vogue at his time. Of course we do not say, copy the method of Burns; but we do say, copy his literary response to life, and his reliance upon contemporary idiom and tune. If it be asked now, as naturally it will, if in Walt Whitman we have a poet who has tried to do this, the answer is unmistakable. His poetry may not be powerful in "the general heart of men" yet, as were the songs of Burns in his time; but we have to remember the incalculable enlargement of life since then, and the enormously increased difficulties of the task, especially, as before remarked, in the case of one who, like Walt Whitman, sets himself to cope with the whole universal, cosmic sweep of space and time. His is, therefore, as he has constantly affirmed, an initiative, rather than a con- summation in poetry. "Poets to come!" he cries:— "Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater
than before known
Arouse! for you must justify me.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the
future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in
the darkness."
Of the virtue of his work as a final accomplishment in poetry, there would probably be no two English readers able to agree. What it is wished to lay
stress on here, is that, as he has been the first to attempt this great work, so his significance as a pioneer, as an initiator, is beyond all dispute. He is suggestive rather than completive; but his sugges- tion is to the younger minds of to-day by far the greatest thing that is to be found in contemporary poetic movement. Thinking on this suggestion, first of all from its
Leaves of Grass. It is a substitution, it is found atpurely literary side, we are brought face to face at once with problems of extreme difficulty, which have been suggestively treated by William Sloane Kennedy and other American writers recently, but which it will be rather attempted to roughly state than to solve here. The whole of Whitman's depart- ure in poetry is concerned with the vexed question of prose and verse, and the proper functions of the two modes of expression. Absolutely stated, prose is the equivalent of speech in all its range; verse, of song. But it is evident at once that the matter does not rest here. In a hundred ways needs arise which cannot be met by a strict adherence to this line of demarcation, as when, for instance, an elevation of utterance is required that yet does not, properly speaking, arise into pure song. In the right adjustment then of the relations betwixt prose and verse lies the difficult secret of the art of words. Whitman noting in his literary work the restricting effect of exact rhyme measures, sought to attain a new poetic mode by a return to the rhythmic move- ment of prose, with what signal result may be seen by a sympathetic dive almost anywhere into once, of harmony for melody; of a larger, more
epic music for the old lyric movements of poetry. This tendency is indeed one of the time; we find the same in music, as in Wagner, and his disciple Dvorák,—a tendency to advance further and further from tune towards complicate harmonic orchestral effects. And the advance is a great one beyond a doubt. The only danger is that in accepting this new tendency, we may neglect the great virtues of past modes. Always the salvation of all art-expression lies in the perfect adjustment of the new with the old. It is earnestly to be desired, therefore, that the "poets to come," especially those of the immediate future, will be wise enough to see this, and, taking the initiative of Walt Whitman greatly to heart, yet have the high artistic sanity to eschew his mannerisms and incidental weaknesses, and follow only what is essential and supreme in his method, reconciling it intelligently with his noble teaching of the old masters of song. A newer, grander harmony it has been his to herald; but we who come of Celtic stock feel that the older music, the old tunes of the heart, have still a great future, and that it is in the right adjustments of their simple music with the new that the success of poetry as a minister of life in the future will lie. Thinking on Walt Whitman's initiative in the
larger sense, and turning over the Leaves of Grass in a spirit of sympathetic response,—of response as if to a work of nature, rather than of art,—the consciousness of an intimate new seeing of things there thrills one through and through. It is not now the testament of the universal love for men
alone, which we laid stress upon earlier in these pages, but the utterly new poetic insight into the conditioning of human life and action. For though Walt Whitman's deliverance has been prepared for and precedented in philosophy, as in Hegel, for instance, to whom he unhesi- tatingly states his indebtedness, in poetry it is quite new. Ideas for long the sole property of the philosophical coteries, and moving within the close range of academic influence, are here set humanly free in song, emotionally related to the common life of man. With Whitman the emotional is all in all, and includes the intellectual, as it were; and the reader who would understand his full significance must bring natural and noble feeling to the task. Given this, and his apparent confusions and violent paradoxes assume poetic order and stimulus. With Hegel, he is a mystic, in the profoundest sense; but his mysticism is one that it does not require academic equipment to master,— it is the mysticism whose germs are to be found in the most ignorant being who, awaking at morning, sees that the sun is shining, and is unconsciously glad. "I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the
Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of
hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I
translate into a new tongue."
It is this new translation of the old sorrows and shames and degradations, and their redemption as parts of the divine order of human life, that many
critics have found so intolerable in Leaves of Grass; but let us rather be glad for so timely a deliverance from an old bondage. It is only a highest imagination that can so relate and ennoble things. The poets and so-called idealists in art have of recent times trusted to incidental and adventitious aids,—the aids of picturesque associations, romance-interest, and so on, to give their subjects poetic relation; but Walt Whit- man has essayed to rely upon the essential primary conditions of being and thought. From this resolute reliance upon the unalterable basis of the divine order he is able to face hopefully prob- lems of this often seemingly so hopeless age, finding under all the tumult of misery and evil the celestial promise: "In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection."
This reliance enables him to speak with superb faith in its future of the Democracy that is so unsettling the old feudal relations, in art as well as in political and social life. And the poet whose apprehension has at once so wide a scientific extension, and such an emotional impulse, may well find his heart large enough to embrace life's illimitable multitudes. The idea of a great loving confederacy of men and women, united in the undying cause of Truth and Beauty, gives a most noble human appeal to many of his poems. "Come," he cries,—
"Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone
upon,
I will make the divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the
rivers of America, and along the shores of the great
lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each
other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades."
Again:— "I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the
attacks of the whole rest of the earth,
I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust
love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that
city,
And in all their looks and words."
It is not possible here to go much into detail in
speaking of the great wealth of poetry to be found in Leaves of Grass. Perhaps it is best for the uninitiated reader to begin with the "Inscriptions," then turn to the section called "Calamus," (Calamus being a sort of American grass which is used here to typify comradeship and love!) reading two or three poems there. Proceeding then, turn to the more simply tuneful summons of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" in the "Birds of Passage" series, after which it would be an impertinence to direct further,
except perhaps to suggest a return to the beginning of the book to read "Starting from Paumanok," which is a sort of overture to Whitman's after music. By this time the reader's fate as far as Walt Whitman's influence is concerned will be decided. Either will have come the supreme joy of the approach to a new poet, or the tedium of an unappreciated book. Many of Whitman's most characteristic poems
have necessarily been omitted from a volume like the present, intended for an average popular English audience—an audience which, be it confessed, from the actual experiment of the present editor, is apt to find much of Leaves of Grass as unintelli- gible as Sordello, not without a certain excuse haply in some instances. The method of selection adopted in preparing the volume has certainly not been scientific or very profoundly critical. The limitations of the average run of readers have been, as far as they could be surmised, the limitations of the book, and upon the head of that unaccountable class, who have in the past been guilty of not a few poets' and prophets' maltreatment, rest any odium the thorough-paced disciple of Walt Whitman may attach to the present venture. For those who wish to thoroughly apprehend the Leaves of Grass it will be necessary, let it be said at once, to study them in their complete forms, which is to be obtained in the edition of Messrs. Wilson & McCormick, of Glasgow; as also the indispensable Specimen Days and Collect, and the Life by Dr. Maurice Bucke, mentioned in these pages. The Specimen Days volume also contains the famous preface to the
first edition of Leaves of Grass; a very important commentary on the tendencies of the time, entitled Democratic Vistas; a suggestive essay, Poetry To-Day in America; and a lecture on Abraham Lincoln, delivered several times in the last few years in the United States. Dr. Bucke's Life, which is simply invaluable as a straightfor- wardly enthusiastic presentment of a great and heroic nature, contains, too, W. D. O'Connor's Good Grey Poet, and a valuable appendix of con- temporary American notices; the Glasgow edition having a similar list of English ones compiled by Professor Dowden. In this English list the names of Ruskin, Tennyson, Swinburne, Buchanan, Symonds, and other leading poets and writers, bear unique testimony to Whitman's influence. At last, in thinking on all that might have been
said to aid the true apprehension of one of the few true books that have appeared in the present generation, these jottings of comment and sug- gestion seem, on looking over them, more or less futile and beyond the mark. But it would be im- possible for any writer, and especially for a young writer, to speak at all finally and absolutely in dealing with a nature so unprecedented and so powerful. All that he can hope to do is to suggest and facilitate the means of approach. Else there is a great temptation to dwell upon many matters left untouched, and specially to enlarge with enthusiasm on certain of the poetic qualities of the book. Of Whitman's felicitous power of words at his best; of his noble symphonic movement in such poems as the heroic funeral-song on President Lincoln,—
"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd"—(part of which, be it remembered, has been set to music by one of our leading young composers, C. Villiers Stanford); of his subtle translation of those glimpses of the hidden subtle essences of Nature that the artist finds so elusive and yet so insistent; of his original sense, too, of the inner and outer human aspects: it were a long, startlingly unconventional commentary that satisfactorily expressed these and a hundred things besides. Apart from any mere literary qualities or excel-
lences, what needs lastly to have all stress laid upon it, is the urgent, intimate, personal influence that Walt Whitman exerts upon those who approach him with sympathy and healthy feeling. There are very few books that have this fine appeal and stimulus; but once the personal magnetism of Walt Whitman has reached the heart, it will be found that his is a stimulus unlike any other in its natural power. His influence is peculiarly individual, and therefore, from his unique way of relating the individual to the universal, peculiarly organic and potent for moral elevation. Add to this, that he is passionately contemporary, dealing always with the ordinary surroundings, facing directly the apparently unbeautiful and unheroic phenomena of the everyday life, and not asking his readers away into some airy outer-where of pain- ful return, and it will be found that the new seeing he gives is of immediate and constant effect, making perpetually for love and manliness and natural life. With this seeing, indeed, the com- monest things, the most trifling actions, become
transformed and idealised, so that a new dignity enters unawares by the very doorway of the commonplace, ennobling the faces and voices of those around with a divine promise, and making dishonour and unchivalry impossible. It is the younger hearts who will thrill to this
new incitement,—the younger natures, who are putting forth strenuously into the war of human liberation. Older men and women have established their mental and spiritual environment; they work according to their wont. They, many of them, look with something of derision at this san- guine devotion to new ideals, and haply utter smiling protests against the deceptive charms of all things novel. But if the ideals informing Leaves of Grass are in one sense very new, they are also very old,— as old as the world itself. And in the same way, although Walt Whitman is an innovator, he follows as naturally in the literary order as did Marlowe for instance, and after him, Shakespeare, in their day; and is as natively related to this time. The poet who derives in the Nineteenth Century from the Bible, and from Homer,—appreciating such later influences as Carlyle's in letters, Hegels' in philosophy, J. F. Millet's in art, and Wagner's in music, is not blind to the great teaching of the past; and if to this he brings a later seeing all his own, we who are young may well respond to him, too, in turn, and advance fearlessly in the lines of his unique initiative. To the younger hearts and minds, then, be these Leaves of Grass, gathered and interwoven as the emblem of a corresponding fellowship of men and women, dedicate!
"The prairie-grass dividing, its special odour breathing,
I demand of it the spiritual corresponding.
Demand the copious and close companionship of men."
The natural life, informed with virile religious love,—the spirit of comradeship, as opposed to the antagonism of class with class, and nation with nation, which has stirred men selfishly and cruelly so long: this were the salvation, cries Walt Whit- man, of the new Democracy, inevitably now at hand. And with his tones of heroic incitement and earnest remonstrance ringing in our midst, we who are young may do much in the stress and tumult of the advance to a new and endangered era for the high order of love and truth and liberty, for the divine cause of all heroes and poets. "Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd!
Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more
august dramas,
I see not America only, not only, Liberty's nation but
other nations preparing,
I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations,
the solidarity of races,
I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the
world's stage.
. . . . . . .
Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me!
(I know not whether I sleep or wake;)
The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring
in shadow behind me,
The unperform'd, more gigantic that ever, advance,
advance upon me."
ERNEST RHYS.
CHELSEA, 1886. ___________ INSCRIPTIONS. ___________ I HEARD that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.
TO THEE OLD CAUSE. TO thee old cause! Thou peerless, passionate, good cause, Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea, Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands, After a strange sad war, great war for thee, (I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be really fought, for thee,)
These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee.
(A war O soldiers not for itself alone, Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.)
Thou orb of many orbs! Thou seething principle! thou well-kept, latent germ! thou centre!
Around the idea of thee the war revolving, With all its angry and vehement play of causes, (With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,) These recitatives for thee,—my book and the war are one,
Merged in its spirit I and mine, as the contest hinged on thee,
As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to itself,
Around the idea of thee. ONE'S-SELF I SING. ONE'S-SELF I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.
AS I ponder'd in silence, Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long, A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect, Terrible in beauty, age, and power, The genius of poets of old lands, As to me directing like flame its eyes, With finger pointing to many immortal songs, And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said, Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring
bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, The making of perfect soldiers. Be it so, then I answer'd, I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and
greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight,
advance and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,)
the field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul, Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles, I above all promote brave soldiers. IN CABIN'D SHIPS AT SEA. IN cabin'd ships at sea, The boundless blue on every side expanding, With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
Or some lone bark buoy'd on the dense marine,
Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails, She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under many a star at night,
By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
Here are our thoughts, voyagers' thoughts,In full rapport at last. Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
The sky o'erarches here, we feel the undulating deck
beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless
motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast sug-
gestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing
syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the
melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all
here,
And this is ocean's poem. Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny, You not a reminiscence of the land alone, You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos'd I know not whither, yet ever full of faith,
Consort to every ship that sails, sail you! Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it here in every leaf;)
Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the imperious waves,
Chant on, sail on, bear o'er the boundless blue from me to every sea,
This song for mariners and all their ships.
YOU who celebrate bygones, Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself,
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests,
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself,)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be, I project the history of the future. WHEN I READ THE BOOK. WHEN I read the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? [my life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write (As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.) BEGINNING MY STUDIES. BEGINNING my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
BEGINNERS. HOW they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals,)
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth, How they inure to themselves as much as to any—what a paradox appears their age,
How people respond to them, yet know them not, How there is something relentless in their fate all times, How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.
ME IMPERTURBE. ME imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature, Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things,
Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they, Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought,
Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee, or far north or inland,
A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of these States or of the coast, or the lakes or
Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
THE SHIP STARTING. LO, the unbounded sea, On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails.
The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately—below emulous waves press forward,
They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam.
I HEAR AMERICA SINGING. I HEARAmerica singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. WHAT PLACE IS BESIEGED? WHAT place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the siege?
Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave, immortal,
And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery, And artillery-men, the deadliest that ever fired gun. STILL THOUGH THE ONE I SING. STILL though the one I sing, (One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to Nationality,
I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless, indispensable fire!)
SHUT not your doors to me proud libraries, For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made, The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page. POETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his
face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.
STRANGER, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you? THOU reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants. STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born, Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother, After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements, Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas, Or a soldier camp'd or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner in California,
Or rude in my home in Dakota's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring,
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy,
Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara,
Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull,
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze,
Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk,
And heard at dusk the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars,
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.
Victory, union, faith, identity, time, The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports. This then is life, Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How curious! how real! Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun. See revolving the globe, The ancestor-continents away group'd together, The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus between.
See, vast trackless spaces, As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill, Countless masses debouch upon them, They are now cover'd with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.
See, projected through time, For me an audience interminable. With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, One generation playing its part and passing on, Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,
With faces turn'd sideways or backward towards me to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.
Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian! Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses! For you a programme of chants. Chants of the prairies, Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea,
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota,
Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and thence equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all. Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring,
Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,
And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you.
I conn'd old times, I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.
In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique? Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.
Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, Language-shapers on other shores, Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves,
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place with my own day here. Here lands female and male, Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of materials,
Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow'd, The ever-tending, the finalè of visible forms, The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing, Yes here comes my mistress the soul. The soul, Forever and forever—longer than soil is brown and solid—longer than water ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality, For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and of immortality.
I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any circumstances be subjected to
another State,
And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night between all the States, and
between any two of them,
And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with menacing points,
And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces; And a song make I of the One form'd out of all, The fang'd and glittering One whose head is over all, Resolute warlike One including and over all, (However high the head of any else that head is over all.) I will acknowledge contemporary lands, I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously every city large and small,
And employments! I will put in my poems that with you is heroism upon land and sea,
And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.
I will sing the song of companionship, I will show what alone must finally compact these, I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it in me,
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening to consume me,
I will lift what has too long kept down those smoulder- ing fires,
I will give them complete abandonment, I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love, For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?
I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races, I advance from the people in their own spirit, Here is what sings unrestricted faith. Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also,
I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is—and I say there is in fact no evil,
(Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land or to me, as any thing else.)
I too, following many and follow'd by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena,
(It may be I am destin'd to utter the loudest cries there, the winner's pealing shouts,
Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above every thing.)
Each is not for its own sake, I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough, None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough, None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,
Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur; (Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion, Nor land nor man or woman without religion).
What are you doing young man? Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
These ostensible realities, politics, points? Your ambition or business whatever it may be? It is well—against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,
But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's sake,
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of the earth,
Any more than such are to religion. What do you seek so pensive and silent? What do you need camerado? Dear son do you think it is love? Listen dear son—listen America, daughter or son, It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great,
But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all.
Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,
The following chants each for its kind I sing.
My comrade! For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.
Melange mine own, the unseen and the seen, Mysterious ocean where the streams empty, Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me,
Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we know not of,
Contact daily and hourly that will not release me, These selecting, these in hints demanded of me. Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me,
Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,
Any more than I am held to the heavens and all the spiritual world,
After what they have done to me, suggesting themes. O such themes—equalities! O divine average! Warblings under the sun, usher'd as now, or at noon, or setting,
Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither,
I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and cheerfully pass them forward.
As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk, I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest in the briers hatching her brood.
I have seen the he-bird also, I have paus'd to hear him near at hand inflating his throat and joyfully singing.
And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really sang for was not there only,
Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,
But subtle, clandestine, away beyond, A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.
Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing.
Ma femme! for the brood beyond us and of us, For those who belong here and those to come, I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been
heard upon earth.
I will make the songs of passion to give them their way, And your songs outlaw'd offenders, for I scan you with kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as
any.
I will make the true poem of riches, To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death;
I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other,
And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin'd to tell you with courageous
clear voice to prove you illustrious,
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,
And that all the things of the universe are miracles, each as profound as any.
I will not make poems with reference to parts, But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days,
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul,
Because having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has
reference to the soul.
Was somebody asking to see the soul? See, your own shape and countenance, persons, sub- stances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the
rocks and sands.
All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them; How can the real body ever die and be buried?
Of your real body and any man's or woman's real body, Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse- cleaners and pass to fitting spheres,
Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the moment of death.
Not the types set up by the printer return their im- pression, the meaning, the main concern,
Any more than a man's substance and life or a woman's substance and life return in the body and the soul,
Indifferently before death and after death. Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!
Whoever you are, to you endless announcements! Daughter of the lands did you wait for your poet? Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indica- tive hand?
Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,
Exulting words, words to Democracy's lands. Interlink'd, food-yielding lands! Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple and the grape!
Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of those sweet-air'd interminable plateaus!
Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west Colorado winds!
Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware! Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan! Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and Connecticut!
Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks! Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen's land! Inextricable lands! the clutch'd together! the pas- sionate ones!
The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb'd!
The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the inexperienced sisters!
Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! the diverse! the compact!
The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carol- inian!
O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any rate include you all with perfect love!
I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any sooner than another!
O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this hour with irrepressible love,
Walking New England, a friend, a traveller, Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on Paumanok's sands,
Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwell- ing in every town,
Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts, Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls, Of and through the States as during life, each man and woman my neighbour,
The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,
The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet with any of them,
Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my house of adobie,
Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in Maryland,
Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and ice welcome to me,
Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every new brother,
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they unite with the old ones,
Coming among the new ones myself to be their com- panion and equal, coming personally to you now,
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me. With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on. For your life adhere to me, (I may have to be persuaded many times before I con- sent to give myself really to you, but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?) No dainty dolce affettuoso I, Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.
On my way a moment I pause, Here for you! and here for America! Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States I harbinge glad and sublime,
And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.
The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to
us for names,
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, [Walla,
Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla- Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names.
Expanding and swift, henceforth, Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious, [branching,
A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant, and A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inven- tions and arts.
These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more but arise,
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented
waves and storms.
See, steamers steaming through my poems, See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing.
See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude
fence, and the backwoods village,
See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon
my poems as upon their own shores,
See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, animals wild and tame—see, beyond the Kaw, countless herds of
buffalo feeding on short curly grass,
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless
vehicles, and commerce,
See, the many-cylinder'd steam printing-press—see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent,
See, through Atlantica's depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return'd,
See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle,
See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, miners digging mines—see, the numberless factories,
See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools—see from among them superior judges, philosophs,
Presidents, emerge, drest in working dresses,
See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me well-belov'd, close-held by day and night,
Hear the loud echoes of my songs there—read the hints come at last.
O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly! O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild! O now I triumph—and you shall also; O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me. ___________ IN PATHS UNTRODDEN. IN paths untrodden, In the growth by margins of pond-waters, Escaped from the life that exhibits itself, From all the standards hitherto publish'd, from the pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul, Clear to me now standards not yet publish'd, clear to me that my soul,
That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades, Here by myself away from the clank of the world, Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic, No longer abash'd, (for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere,)
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the rest,
Resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life, Bequeathing hence types of athletic love, Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first year,
I proceed for all who are or have been young men, To tell the secret my nights and days, To celebrate the need of comrades. FOR YOU O DEMOCRACY COME, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades
With the life-long love of comrades
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great
lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs. THESE I SINGING IN SPRING. THESE I singing in spring collect for lovers, (For who but I should understand lovers and all their sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?) Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences where the old stones thrown there, pick'd from the fields, have accumu-
lated,
(Wild flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones and partly cover them, beyond these I pass,)
Far, far in the forest, or sauntering later in summer, before I think where I go,
Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,
Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me, Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them, [is near me,
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever Here, lilac, with a branch of pine, Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of com- rades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!)
And twigs of maple and a bunch of wild orange and chestnut,
And stems of currants and plum-blows, and the aromatic cedar,
These I compass'd around by a thick cloud of spirits, Wandering, point to or touch as I pass, or throw them loosely from me,
Indicating to each one what he shall have, giving some- thing to each;
But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that I reserve,
I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself am capable of loving.
OF THE TERRIBLE DOUBT OF APPEARANCES. OF the terrible doubt of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colours, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only
apparitions, and the real something has yet to be
known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem) as from my present point of view,
and might prove (as of course they would) nought
of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from
entirely changed points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my lovers my dear friends,
When he in whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade
us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me. THE BASE OF ALL METAPHYSICS. AND now gentlemen, A word I give to remain in your memories and minds, As base and finalè too for all metaphysics. (So to the students the old professor, At the close of his crowded course.) Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems, [and Hegel,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato, And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems, [see,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend, [parents,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and Of city for city and land for land. RECORDERS AGES HENCE. RECORDERS ages hence, Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I will tell you what to say of me,
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
The friend the lover's portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest,
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth,
Who often walk'd lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
Who pensive away from one he lov'd often lay sleepless and dissatisfied at night,
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov'd might secretly be indifferent to him,
Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills, he and another wandering hand in
hand, they twain apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter'd the streets curv'd with his arm the shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his
friend rested upon him also.
WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still it
was not a happy night for me that follow'd,
And else when I carous'd, or when my plans were accom- plish'd, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath
of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander'd alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the
sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish'd me more, and the beautiful day
pass'd well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.
TOWARD ME? ARE you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?
ROOTS AND LEAVES THEMSELVES ALONE. ROOTS and leaves themselves alone are these, Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and pond-side,
Breast-sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter than vines,
Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the sun is risen,
Breezes of land and love set from living shores to you on the living sea, to you, O sailors!
Frost-mellow'd berries and Third-month twigs offer'd fresh to young persons wandering out in the fields
when the winter breaks up,
Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,
of the sun to them they willBuds to be unfolded on the old terms, If you bring the warmth open and bring form, colour, perfume, to you,
If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches and trees.
I SAW IN LOUISIANA A LIVE-OAK GROWING. I SAW in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I know I
could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you, All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured, [me,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you. THIS MOMENT YEARNING AND THOUGHTFUL. THIS moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone, It seems to me there are other men in other lands yearning and thoughtful,
It seems to me I can look over and behold them in Germany, Italy, France, Spain,
Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan, talking other dialects,
And it seems to me if I could know those men I should become attached to them as I do to men in my own
lands,
O I know we should be brethren and lovers, I know I should be happy with them.
I HEAR it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions, (What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, The institution of the dear love of comrades. THE PRAIRIE-GRASS DIVIDING. THE prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing, I demand of it the spiritual corresponding, Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings, Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with free- dom and command, leading not following,
Those with a never-quell'd audacity, those with sweet and lusty flesh clear of taint,
Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors, as to say Who are you?
Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd, never obedient,
Those of inland America.
WHEN I peruse the conquer'd fame of heroes and the victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the
generals,
Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house,
But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them,
How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long,
Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill'd with the bitterest envy.
NO LABOUR-SAVING MACHINE. NO labour-saving machine, Nor discovery have I made, Nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found hospital or library,
Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage for America, Nor literary success nor intellect; nor book for the book- shelf,
But a few carols vibrating through the air I leave, For comrades and lovers.
A GLIMPSE through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark'd
seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may
hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speak- ing little, perhaps not a word.
WHAT THINK YOU I TAKE MY PEN IN HAND? WHAT think you I take my pen in hand to record? The battle-ship, perfect-model'd, majestic, that I saw pass the offing to-day under full sail?
The splendours of the past day? or the splendour of the night that envelops me?
Or the vaunted glory and growth of the great city spread around me?—no;
But merely of two simple men I saw to-day on the pier in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of
dear friends,
The one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kiss'd him,
While the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.
A LEAF for hand in hand; You natural persons old and young! You on the Mississippi and on all the branches and bayous of the Mississippi!
You friendly boatmen and mechanics! you roughs! You twain! and all processions moving along the streets!
I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.
I DREAM'D IN A DREAM. I DREAM'D in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream'd that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words. SOMETIMES WITH ONE I LOVE. SOMETIMES with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
TO the East and to the West, To the man of the Seaside State and of Pennsylvania, To the Kanadian of the north, to the Southerner I love, These with perfect trust to depict you as myself, the germs are in all men,
I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship, exaltè, previously unknown,
Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men.
FAST ANCHOR'D ETERNAL O LOVE! FAST-ANCHOR'D eternal O love! O woman I love! O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you!
Then separate, as disembodied or another born, Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation, I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man, O sharer of my roving life. AMONG THE MULTITUDE. AMONG the men and women the multitude, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs, Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am,
Some are baffled, but that one is not—that one knows me.
Ah lover and perfect equal, I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirec- tions,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.
O YOU WHOM I OFTEN AND SILENTLY COME. O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,
As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.
FULL of life now, compact, visible, I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States, To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence, To you yet unborn these, seeking you. When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)
THAT shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering,
How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me;
But among my lovers and caroling these songs, O I never doubt whether that is really me. ___________ AFOOT and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good- fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, [cisms,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criti- Strong and content I travel the open road. The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them. (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens, I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them, I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here. Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas'd, the illiterate person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar's tramp, the drunkard's stagger, the laughing party
of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,
The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of fur- niture into the town, the return back from the town,
They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted,
None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me. You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.
You flagg'd walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined side! you distant ships!
You rows of houses! you window-pierc'd façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards! You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches! [crossings! You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden From all that has touch'd you I believe you have im- parted to yourselves, and now would impart the same
secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be
evident and amicable with me.
The earth expanding right hand and left hand, The picture alive, every part in its best light, The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,
The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.
O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me? Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost? Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and
undenied, adhere to me?
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
You express me better than I can express myself, You shall be more to me than my poem. I think heroic deeds were all conceiv'd in the open air, and all free poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy. From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space, The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me, I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go, I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them, Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me, Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear'd it would not astonish me.
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Here a great personal deed has room, (Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)
Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, [content,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions, They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the land-
scape and flowing currents.
Here is realization, Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.
Only the kernel of every object nourishes; Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?
Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion'd, it is apropos; [strangers?
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls? Here is the efflux of the soul, The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower'd gates, ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers? What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side? What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by and pause?
What gives me to be free to a woman's and man's good- will? what gives them to be free to mine?
The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness, I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times, Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attaching character, The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it
sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)
Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,
From it falls distill'd the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact. Allons! whoever you are come travel with me! Traveling with me you find what never tires. The earth never tires, The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
Allons! we must not stop here, However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However shelter'd this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.
Allons! the inducements shall be greater, We will sail pathless and wild seas, We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail.
Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements, Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity; Allons! from all formules! From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests. The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the burial waits no longer.
Allons! yet take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,
None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,
Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself, [bodies,
Only those may come who come in sweet and determin'd No diseas'd person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.
(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
We convince by our presence.) Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you: You shall not heap up what is call'd riches, You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you
are call'd by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach'd hands toward you.
Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!
They too are on the road—they are the swift and majestic men—they are the greatest women, Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas, Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
Habituès of many distant countries, habituès of far distant dwellings,
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children,
Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers- down of coffins,
Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious years each emerging from that which pre-
ceded it,
Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,
Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days, Journeyers gaily with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded and well-grain'd manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass'd, content,
Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood,
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless, To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights, To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys, To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, however long but it stretches and waits for
you,
To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither,
To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet
not abstracting one particle of it,
To take the best of the farmer's farm and the rich man's elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-
married couple, and the fruits of orchards and
flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward where- ever you go,
To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, to gather the love out of their
hearts.
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
All parts away for the progress of souls, All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe,
falls into niches and corners before the procession
of souls along the grand roads of the universe.
Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is
the needed emblem and sustenance.
Forever alive, forever forward, Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go,
But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great.
Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been
built for you.
Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!
It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it. Behold through you as bad as the rest, Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,
Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash'd and trimm'd faces,
Behold a secret silent loathing and despair. No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors,
In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,
Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bed-room, everywhere,
Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-
bones,
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
Speaking of any thing else, but never of itself.
Allons! through struggles and wars! The goal that was named cannot be countermanded. Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature? Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no
matter what, shall come forth something to make a
greater struggle necessary.
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion, He going with me must go well arm'd, He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions.
Allons! the road is before us! It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain'd!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen'd!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn'd!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher! Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
FLOOD-TIDE below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west—sun there half-an-hour high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you
suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than
you might suppose.
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself dis- integrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the
scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage
over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, [and them,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and
east,
Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half-an-hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, [felt,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.
I too many and many a time cross'd the river of old, Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating
their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water,
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south- westward, [violet,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving, Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me, Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars, The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset, The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on each side by the barges, the hay-
boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down
into the clefts of streets.
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near to me, Others the same—others who look back on me because I look'd forward to them,
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)
What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine, I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv'd identity by my body, That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me. The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest, Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word, [actress,
Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small. Closer yet I approach you. What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me? Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide? The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly
by my nighest name as I approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?
We understand then do we not? What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves! Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splen- dour me, or the men and women generations after
me!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers! Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! [and answers!
Throb baffled and curious brain! throw out questions
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution! Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name! [or actress!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor Play the old role, the role that is great or small accord- ing as one makes it!
Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly-on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from
you!
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one's head, in the sunlit water!
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail'd schooners, sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower'd at sunset!
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light
over the tops of the houses!
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are, You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul, About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,
Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers, [spiritual,
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. SONG OF THE ANSWERER. 1. NOW list to my morning's romanza, I tell the signs of the Answerer,
To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me.
A young man comes to me bearing a message from his brother,
How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother?
Tell him to send me the signs. And I stand before the young man face to face, and take his right hand in my left hand and his left hand in
my right hand,
And I answer for his brother and for men, and I answer for him that answers for all, and send these signs.
Him all wait for, him all yield up to, his word is decisive and final,
Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves as amid light,
Him they immerse and he immerses them. Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape, people, animals,
The profound earth and its attributes and the unquiet ocean, (so tell I my morning's romanza,)
All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy,
The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably reaps,
The noblest and costliest cities, others grading and building and he domiciles there,
Nothing for any one but what is for him, near and far are for him, the ships in the offing,
The perpetual shows and marches on land are for him if they are for anybody.
He puts things in their attitudes, He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love, He places his own times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and sisters, associations, employment, politics, so
that the rest never shame them afterward, nor
assume to command them.
He is the Answerer, What can be answer'd he answers, and what cannot be answer'd he shows how it cannot be answer'd.
A man is a summons and challenge, (It is vain to skulk—do you hear that mocking and laughter? do you hear the ironical echoes?)
Books, friendships, philosophers, priests, action, pleasure, pride, beat up and down seeking to give satisfaction,
He indicates the satisfaction, and indicates them that beat up and down also.
Whichever the sex, whatever the season or place, he may go freshly and gently and safely by day or by night,
He has the pass-key of hearts, to him the response of the prying of hands on the knobs.
His welcome is universal, the flow of beauty is not more welcome or universal than he is,
The person he favours by day or sleeps with at night is blessed.
Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man trans-
lates himself also,
One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees how they join.
He says indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President at his levee,
And he says Good-day my brother, to Cudge that hoes in the sugar-field,
And both understand him and know that his speech is right.
He walks with perfect ease in the capitol, He walks among the Congress, and one Representative says to another, Here is our equal appearing and
new.
Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic, And the soldiers suppose him to be a soldier, and the sailors that he has follow'd the sea,
And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist,
And the labourers perceive he could labour with them and love them,
No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has follow'd it,
No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and sisters there.
The English believe he comes of their English stock, A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near, removed from none.
Whoever he looks at in the traveler's coffee-house claims him,
The Italian or Frenchman is sure, the German is sure, the Spaniard is sure, and the island Cuban is sure,
The engineer, the deck-hand on the great lakes, or on the Mississippi or St. Lawrence or Sacramento, or
Hudson or Paumanok sound, claims him.
The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood,
The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see themselves in the ways of him, he
strangely transmutes them,
They are not vile any more, they hardly know them- selves they are so grown.
The indications and tally of time, Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs,
Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts, What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their words,
The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark, but the words of the maker of
poems are the general light and dark,
The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality, His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.
The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets, The singers are welcom'd, understood, appear often enough, but rare has the day been, likewise the
spot, of the birth of the maker of poems,
the Answerer,
(Not every century nor every five centuries has contain'd such a day, for all its names.)
The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible names, but the name of each of them is
one of the singers,
The name of each is, eye-singer, ear-singer, head-singer, sweet-singer, night-singer, parlour-singer, love-
singer, weird-singer, or something else.
All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems,
The words of true poems do not merely please, The true poets are not followers of beauty but the august masters of beauty;
The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers and fathers, [of science.
The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause
Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health, rudeness of body, withdrawnness,
Gaiety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems.
The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer,
The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all these underlie the maker of poems, the
Answerer.
The words of the true poems give you more than poems, They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behaviour, histories, essays,
daily life, and every thing else,
They balance ranks, colours, races, creeds, and the sexes, They do not seek beauty, they are sought, Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.
They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,
They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,
Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,
To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.
A SONG OF JOYS. O TO make the most jubilant song! Full of music—full of manhood, womanhood, infancy! Full of common employments—full of grain and trees.
O for the voices of animals—O for the swiftness and balance of fishes!
O for the dropping of raindrops in a song! O for the sunshine and motion of waves in a song! O the joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning!
It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time, I will have thousands of globes and all time. O the engineer's joys! to go with a locomotive! To hear the hiss of steam, the merry shriek, the steam- whistle, the laughing locomotive!
To push with resistless way and speed off in the distance. O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides! The leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds, the moist fresh stillness of the woods,
The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak, and all through the forenoon.
O the horseman's and horsewoman's joys! The saddle, the gallop, the pressure upon the seat, the cool gurgling by the ears and hair.
O the fireman's joys! I hear the alarm at dead of night, I hear bells, shouts! I pass the crowd, I run! The sight of the flames maddens me with pleasure. O the joy of the strong-brawn'd fighter, towering in the arena in perfect condition, conscious of power,
thirsting to meet his opponent.
O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is capable of generating and emit-
ting in steady and limitless floods.
O the mother's joys! The watching, the endurance, the precious love, the anguish, the patiently yielded life.
O the joy of increase, growth, recuperation, The joy of soothing and pacifying, the joy of concord and harmony.
O to go back to the place where I was born, To hear the birds sing once more, To ramble about the house and barn and over the fields once more,
And through the orchard and along the old lanes once more.
O to have been brought up on bays, lagoons, creeks, or along the coast,
To continue and be employ'd there all my life, The briny and damp smell, the shore, the salt weeds exposed at low water,
The work of fishermen, the work of the eel-fisher and clam-fisher;
I come with my clam-rake and spade, I come with my eel-spear,
Is the tide out? I join the group of clam-diggers on the flats, I laugh and work with them, I joke at my work like a mettlesome young man;
In winter I take my eel-basket and eel-spear and travel out on foot on the ice—I have a small axe to cut
holes in the ice,
Behold me well-clothed going gayly or returning in the afternoon, my brood of tough boys accompanying
me,
My brood of grown and part-grown boys, who love to be with no one else so well as they love to be with me,
By day to work with me, and by night to sleep with me. Another time in warm weather out in a boat, to lift the lobster-pots where they are sunk with heavy stones,
(I know the buoys,)
O the sweetness of the Fifth-month morning upon the water as I row just before sunrise toward the buoys,
I pull the wicker pots up slantingly, the dark green lobsters are desperate with their claws as I take them
out, I insert wooden pegs in the joints of their
pincers, [back to the shore,
I go to all the places one after another, and then row There in a huge kettle of boiling water the lobsters shall be boil'd till their colour becomes scarlet.
Another time mackerel-taking, Voracious, mad for the hook, near the surface, they seem to fill the water for miles;
Another time fishing for rock-fish in Chesapeake bay, I one of the brown-faced crew;
Another time trailing for blue-fish off Paumanok, I stand with braced body,
My left foot is on the gunwale, my right arm throws far out the coils of slender rope,
In sight around me the quick veering and darting of fifty skiffs, my companions.
O boating on the rivers, The voyage down the St. Lawrence, the superb scenery, the steamers,
The ships sailing, the Thousand Islands, the occasional timber-raft and the raftsmen with long-reaching
sweep-oars,
The little huts on the rafts, and the stream of smoke when they cook supper at evening.
(O something pernicious and dread! Something far away from a puny and pious life! Something unproved! something in a trance! Something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.) O to work in mines, or forging iron, Foundry casting, the foundry itself, the rude high roof, the ample and shadow'd space,
The furnace, the hot liquid pour'd out and running. O to resume the joys of the soldier! To feel the presence of a brave commanding officer—to feel his sympathy!
To behold his calmness—to be warm'd in the rays of his smile! [beat!
To go to battle—to hear the bugles play and the drums To hear the crash of artillery—to see the glittering of the bayonets and musket-barrels in the sun!
To see men fall and die and not complain! To taste the savage taste of blood—to be so devilish! To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy! O the whaleman's joys! O I cruise my old cruise again! I feel the ship's motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me,
There—she blows!
I hear the cry again sent down from the mast-head, Again I spring up the rigging to look with the rest—we descend, wild with excitement,
I leap in the lower'd boat, we row toward our prey where he lies,
We approach stealthy and silent, I see the mountainous mass, lethargic, basking,
I see the harpooneer standing up, I see the weapon dart from his vigorous arm;
O swift again far out in the ocean the wounded whale, settling, running to windward, tows me,
Again I see him rise to breathe, we row close again, I see a lance driven through his side, press'd deep, turn'd in the wound,
Again we back off, I see him settle again, the life is leaving him fast,
As he rises he spouts blood, I see him swim in circles narrower and narrower, swiftly cutting the water—I
see him die,
He gives one convulsive leap in the centre of the circle, and then falls flat and still in the bloody foam.
O the old manhood of me, my noblest joy of all! My children and grandchildren, my white hair and beard,
My largeness, calmness, majesty, out of the long stretch of my life.
O ripen'd joy of womanhood! O happiness at last! I am more than eighty years of age, I am the most venerable mother,
How clear is my mind—how all people draw nigh to me! What attractions are these beyond any before? what bloom more than the bloom of youth?
What beauty is this that descends upon me and rises out of me?
O the orator's joys! To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the ribs and throat,
To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with your- self,
To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue. O the joy of my soul leaning pois'd on itself, receiving identity through materials and loving them, observing
characters and absorbing them,
My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch, reason, articulation, comparison,
memory, and the like,
The real life of my senses and flesh transcending my senses and flesh,
My body done with materials, my sight done with my material eyes,
Proved to me this day beyond cavil that it is not my material eyes which finally see,
Nor my material body which finally loves, walks, laughs, shouts, embraces, procreates.
O the farmer's joys! Ohioan's, Illinoisian's, Wisconsinese', Kanadian's, Iowan's, Kansian's, Missourian's, Oregonese' joys!
To rise at peep of day and pass forth nimbly to work, To plough land in the fall for winter-sown crops, To plough land in the spring for maize, To train orchards, to graft the trees, to gather apples in the fall.
O to bathe in the swimming-bath, or in a good place along shore,
To splash the water! to walk ankle-deep, or race naked along the shore.
O to realise space! The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds, To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds, as one with them.
O the joy a manly self-hood! To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,
To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic, To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye, To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,
To confront with your personality all the other person- alities of the earth.
Know'st thou the excellent joys of youth? Joys of the dear companions and of the merry word and laughing face?
Joy of the glad light-beaming day, joy of the wide- breath'd games?
Joy of sweet music, joy of the lighted ball-room and the dancers?
Joy of the plenteous dinner, strong carouse and drinking? Yet O my soul supreme! Know'st thou the joys of pensive thought? Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?
Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow'd yet proud, the suffering and the struggle?
The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day or night?
Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space?
Prophetic joys of better, loftier love's ideals, the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade?
Joys all thine own undying one, joys worthy thee O soul.
O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me. For not life's joys alone I sing, repeating—the joy of death!
The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons,
Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn'd, or render'd to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres, My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the
earth.
O to attract by more than attraction! How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest,
It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws.
O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance!
To be indeed a God! O to sail to sea in a ship! To leave this steady unendurable land, To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the side- walks and the houses,
To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,
To sail and sail and sail! O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys! To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports, A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys. SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE. 1. WEAPON shapely, naked, wan, Head from the mother's bowels drawn, Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,
Resting the grass amid and upon, To be lean'd and to lean on.
Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades, sights and sounds.
Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music, Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ.
Welcome are all earth's lands, each for its kind, Welcome are lands of pine and oak, Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig, Welcome are lands of gold, Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the grape,
Welcome are lands of sugar and rice, Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato and sweet potato,
Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies, Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings, Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming soil of orchards, flax, honey, hemp;
Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands, Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands, Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores, Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc, Lands of iron—lands of the make of the axe. The log at the wood-pile, the axe supported by it, The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space clear'd for a garden,
The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is lull'd,
The walling and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,
The thought of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam ends, and the cutting away of masts,
The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion'd houses and barns,
The remember'd print or narrative, the voyage at a venture of men, families, goods,
The disembarkation, the founding of a new city, The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it, the outset anywhere,
The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa, Willamette, [bags;
The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddle- The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons, The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men with their clear untrimm'd faces,
The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves,
The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the boundless impatience of restraint,
The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types, the solidification;
The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard schooners and sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,
Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods, stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional
snapping,
The glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song, the natural life of the woods, the strong day's work,
The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-
skin;
The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere, The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising, The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them regular,
Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises accord- ing as they were prepared,
The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their curv'd limbs,
Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on by posts and braces,
The hook'd arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,
The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail'd, Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,
The echoes resounding through the vacant building; The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,
The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy
stick for a cross-beam,
The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands rapidly laying the long side-wall, two
hundred feet from front to rear,
The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the trowels striking the bricks,
The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its place, and set with a knock of the trowel-
handle,
The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the steady replenishing by the hod-men;
Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well- grown apprentices,
The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log shaping it toward the shape of a mast,
The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,
The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes,
The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats, stays against the sea;
The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the close-pack'd square,
The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring,
The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line, the rise and fall of the arms forcing
the water,
The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets, the bringing to bear of the hooks and ladders and their execution,
The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors if the fire smoulders under them,
The crowd with their lit faces watching, the glare and dense shadows; [him,
The forger at his forge-furnace and the user of iron after The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and temperer,
The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel and trying the edge with his thumb,
The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in the socket;
The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,
The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,
The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice, The Roman lictors preceding the consuls, The antique European warrior with his axe in combat, The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted head,
The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and foe thither,
The siege of revolted lieges determin'd for liberty, The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce and parley,
The sack of an old city in its time, The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,
Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness, Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the gripe of brigands,
Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despairing,
The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds, The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust, The power of personality just or unjust. Muscle and pluck forever! What invigorates life invigorates death, And the dead advance as much as the living advance, And the future is no more uncertain than the present, For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the delicatesse of the earth and of man,
And nothing endures but personal qualities. What do you think endures? Do you think a great city endures? Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the best built steamships?
Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d'œuvres of engineering, forts, armaments?
Away! these are not to be cherish'd for themselves, They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,
The show passes, all does well enough of course, All does very well till one flash of defiance. A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of
produce merely,
Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-lifters of the departing,
Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth,
Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where money is plentiest,
Nor the place of the most numerous population. Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
Where the city stands that is belov'd by these, and loves them in return and understands them,
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place, Where the men and women think lightly of the laws, Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases, Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons,
Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of death pours its sweeping and unript
waves,
Where outside authority enters always after the pre- cedence of inside authority,
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor, Governor and what not, are
agents for pay,
Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on themselves,
Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs, Where speculations on the soul are encouraged, Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,
Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;
Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands, Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands, Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands, Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands, There the great city stands. How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed! How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a man's or woman's look!
All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears; A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe,
When he or she appears materials are overaw'd, The dispute on the soul stops, The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn'd back, or laid away.
What is your money-making now? what can it do now? What is your respectability now?
What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now?
Where are your jibes of being now? Where are your cavils about the soul now? A sterile landscape covers the ore, there is as good as the best for all the forbidding appearance,
There is the mine, there are the miners, The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplish'd, the hammersmen are at hand with their tongs and
hammers,
What always served and always serves is at hand. Than this nothing has better served, it has served all, Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and long ere the Greek, [any,
Served in building the buildings that last longer than Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient Hindustanee,
Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi, served those whose relics remain in Central America,
Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn pillars and the druids,
Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the snow-cover'd hills of Scandinavia,
Served those who time out of mind made on the granite walls rough sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships,
ocean waves,
Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths, served the pastoral tribes and nomads,
Served the long distant Kelt, served the hardy pirates of the Baltic,
Served before any of those the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,
Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure, and the making of those for war,
Served all great works on land and all great works on the sea,
For the mediæval ages and before the mediæval ages, Served not the living only then as now, but served the dead.
I see the European headsman, He stands mask'd, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong naked arms,
And leans on a ponderous axe. (Whom have you slaughter'd lately European headsman? Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?) I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs, I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts, Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown'd ladies, impeach'd ministers, rejected kings, [rest.
Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the I see those who in any land have died for the good cause, [out,
The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run (Mind you O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never run out.)
I see the blood wash'd entirely away from the axe, Both blade and helve are clean, They spirt no more the blood of European nobles, they clasp no more the necks of queens.
I see the headsman withdraw and become useless, I see the scaffold untrodden and mouldy, I see no longer any axe upon it,
I see the mighty and friendly emblem of the power of my own race, the newest, largest race.
(America! I do not vaunt my love for you, I have what I have.) The axe leaps! The solid forest gives fluid utterances, They tumble forth, they rise and form, Hut, tent, landing, survey, Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade, Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, lamb, lath, panel, gable, Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition- house, library,
Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, turret, porch, Hoe, rake, pitchfork, pencil, wagon, staff, saw, jack- plane, mallet, wedge, rounce,
Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor, Work-box, chest, string'd instrument, boat, frame, and what not,
Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States, Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans or for the poor or sick,
Manhattan steamboats and clippers taking the measure of all seas.
The shapes arise! Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users and all that neighbors them,
Cutters down of wood and haulers of it to the Penobscot or Kennebec,
Dwellers in cabins among the Californian mountains or by the little lakes, or on the Columbia,
Dwellers south on the banks of the Gila or Rio Grande, friendly gatherings, the characters and fun,
Dwellers along the St. Lawrence, or north in Kanada, or down by the Yellowstone, dwellers on coasts and off
coasts,
Seal-fishers, whalers, arctic seamen breaking passages through the ice.
The shapes arise! Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets, Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads, Shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches, [river craft,
Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows, lake and canal craft, Ship-yards and dry-docks along the Eastern and Western seas, and in many a bay and by-place,
The live-oak kelsons, the pine planks, the spars, the hackmatack-roots for knees,
The ships themselves on their ways, the tiers of scaffolds, the workmen busy outside and inside,
The tools lying around, the great auger and little auger, the adze, bolt, line, square, gouge, and bead-plane.
The shapes arise! The shape measur'd, saw'd, jack'd, join'd, stain'd, The coffin-shape for the dead to lie within in his shroud, The shape got out in posts, in the bedstead posts, in the posts of the bride's bed,
The shape of the little trough, the shape of the rockers beneath, the shape of the babe's cradle,
The shape of the floor-planks, the floor-planks for dancers' feet,
The shape of the planks of the family home, the home of the friendly parents and children,
The shape of the roof of the home of the happy young man and woman, the roof over the well-married
young man and woman,
The roof over the supper joyously cook'd by the chaste wife, and joyously eaten by the chaste husband,
content after his day's work.
The shapes arise! The shape of the prisoner's place in the court-room, and of him or her seated in the place,
The shape of the liquor-bar lean'd against by the young rum-drinker and the old rum-drinker,
The shape of the shamed and angry stairs trod by sneaking footsteps,
The shape of the sly settee, and the adulterous unwhole- some couple,
The shape of the gambling-board with its devilish winnings and losings,
The shape of the step-ladder for the convicted and sentenced murderer, the murderer with haggard face
and pinion'd arms,
The sheriff at hand with his deputies, the silent and white-lipp'd crowd, the dangling of the rope.
The shapes arise! Shapes of doors giving many exits and entrances, The door passing the dissever'd friend flush'd and in haste,
The door that admits good news and bad news, The door whence the son left home confident and puff'd up,
The door he enter'd again from a long and scandalous absence, diseas'd, broken down, without innocence,
without means.
Her shape arises! She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever, The gross and soil'd she moves among do not make her gross and soil'd,
She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is con- ceal'd from her,
She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor, She is the best belov'd, it is without exception, she has no reason to fear and she does not fear,
Oaths, quarrels, hiccupp'd songs, smutty expressions, are idle to her as she passes,
She is silent, she is possess'd of herself, they do not offend her,
She receives them as the laws of Nature receive them, she is strong,
She too is a law of Nature—there is no law stronger than she is.
The main shapes arise! Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries, Shapes ever projecting other shapes, Shapes of turbulent manly cities, Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
Shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.
SONG OF THE REDWOOD-TREE. 1. A CALIFORNIA song, A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air,
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing,
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.
Farewell my brethren,Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring
waters,
My time has ended, my term has come. Along the northern coast, Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves, In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country, With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood forest dense,
I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting. The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not, The quick-ear'd teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to join the refrain,
But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,
That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but the future.
You untold life of me, And all you venerable and innocent joys, Perennial hardy life of me with joys 'mid rain and many
a summer sun,
And the white snows and night and the wild winds; O the great patient rugged joys, my soul's strong joys
unreck'd by man,
(For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have con-
sciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,) Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Our time, our term has come. Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers, We who have grandly fill'd our time; With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past, And leave the field for them. For them predicted long, For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time, For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings! In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks,
Shasta, Nevadas,
These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys,
far Yosemite,
To be in them absorb'd, assimilated. Then to a loftier strain, Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant, As if the heirs, the deities of the West, Joining with master-tongue bore part. Not wan from Asia's fetiches, Nor red from Europe's old dynastic slaughter-house, (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of
wars and scaffolds everywhere,)
But come from Nature's long and harmless throes, peace-
fully builded thence,
These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore, To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new, You promis'd long, we pledge, we dedicate. You occult deep volitions, You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois'd on
yourself, giving not taking law,
You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence
life and love and aught that comes from life and love,
You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of
America, (age upon age working in death the same
as life,)
You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really
shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to
Time and Space,
You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal'd
but ever alert,
You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued,
may-be unconscious of yourselves,
Unswerv'd by all the passing errors, perturbations of the
surface;
You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds,
arts, statutes, literatures,
Here build your homes for good, establish here, these
areas entire, lands of the Western shore,
We pledge, we dedicate to you. For man of you, your characteristic race, Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower
proportionate to Nature,
Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck'd by
wall or roof,
Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently
inure,
Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others' formulas
heed,) here fill his time,
To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last, To disappear, to serve. Thus on the northern coast, In the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers' axes,
The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan,
Such words combined from the redwood-tree, as of voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling,
The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, with- drawing,
All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving, From the Cascade range to the Wahsatch, or Idaho far, or Utah,
To the deities of the modern henceforth yielding, The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity, the settlements, features all,
In the Mendocino woods I caught. The flashing and golden pageant of California, The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands,
The long and varied stretch from Puget sound to Colorado south,
Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air, valleys and mountain cliffs,
The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow, the silent, cyclic chemistry,
The slow and steady ages plodding, the unoccupied sur- face ripening, the rich ores forming beneath;
At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, A swarming and busy race settling and organising every- where,
Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world,
To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific,
Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers, the railroads, with many a thrifty farm,
with machinery,
And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.
But more in you than these, lands of the Western shore, (These but the means, the implements, the standing- ground,)
I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr'd,
Promis'd to be fulfill'd, our common kind, the race. The new society at last, proportionate to Nature, In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial,
In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air.
Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand,
To build a grander future.
YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness.
___________ SONG OF THE UNIVERSAL. 1. COME said the Muse, Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the universal. In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection. By every life a share or more or less, None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the seed is waiting.
Lo! keen-eyed towering science, As from tall peaks the modern overlooking, Successive absolute fiats issuing. Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science, For it has history gather'd like husks around the globe, For it the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.
In spiral routes by long detours, (As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,) For it the partial to the permanent flowing, For it the real to the ideal tends. For it the mystic evolution, Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified.
Forth from their masks, no matter what, From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears,
Health to emerge and joy, joy universal. Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow, Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men and states,
Electric, antiseptic yet, cleaving, suffusing all, Only the good is universal. Over the mountain-growths disease and sorrow, An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering, High in the purer, happier air. From imperfection's murkiest cloud, Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, One flash of heaven's glory. To fashion's, custom's discord, To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies, Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard, From some far shore the final chorus sounding.
O the blest eyes, the happy hearts, That see, that know the guiding thread so fine, Along the mighty labyrinth. And thou America, For the scheme's culmination, its thought and its reality, For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived. Thou too surroundest all, Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by path- ways broad and new,
To the ideal tendest. The measure'd faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past,
Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own, Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,
All eligible to all. All, all for immortality, Love like the light silently wrapping all, Nature's amelioration blessing all, The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain, Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.
Give me O God to sing that thought, Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith, In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space, Health, peace, salvation universal.
Is it a dream? Nay but the lack of it the dream, And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream. PIONEERS! O PIONEERS! COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!
O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labour and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein'd,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all, Pioneers! O pioneers!
Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, (bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.
Pioneers! O pioneers!
All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work, All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way, Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering sons and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!
These are of us, they are with us, All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Still with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind, [your places,
Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to Pioneers! O pioneers!
TO YOU. WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, [your feet and hands,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dis-
sipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me. They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling,
eating, drinking, suffering, dying.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
O I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you,
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in
yourself.
Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,
From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-colour'd light,
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color'd light,
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.
O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life, [time,
Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the What you have done returns already in mockeries, (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)
The mockeries are not you, Underneath them and within them I see you lurk, I pursue you where none else has pursued you, Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others
or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure com- plexion, if these balk others they do not balk me,
The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.
There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you, [good is in you,
There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you, No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.
As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you,
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.
Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! [you, These shows of the East and West are tame compared to These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they,
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she
who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself,
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are pro- vided, nothing is scanted,
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.
The 18th Year of the United States. A GREAT year and place A harsh discordant natal scream out-sounding, to touch the mother's heart closer than any yet.
I walk'd the shores of my Eastern sea, Heard over the waves the little voice, Saw the divine infant where she woke mournfully wail- ing, amid the roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of
falling buildings,
Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running, nor from the single corpses, nor those in heaps, nor
those borne away in the tumbrils,
Was not so desperate at the battues of death—was not so shock'd at the repeated fusillades of the guns.
Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?
Could I wish humanity different? Could I wish the people made of wood and stone? Or that there be no justice in destiny or time? O Liberty! O mate for me! Here too the blaze, the grape-shot and the axe, in reserve, to fetch them out in case of need,
Here too, though long represt, can never be destroy'd, Here too could rise at last murdering and ecstatic, Here too demanding full arrears of vengeance. Hence I sign this salute over the sea, And I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism,
But remember the little voice that I heard wailing, and wait with perfect trust, no matter how long,
And from to-day sad and cogent I maintain the bequeath'd cause, as for all lands,
And I send these words to Paris with my love, And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them,
For I guess there is latent music yet in France, floods of it,
O I hear already the bustle of instruments, they will soon be drowning all that would interrupt them,
O I think the east wind brings a triumphal and free march,
It reaches hither, it swells me to joyful madness, I will run transpose it in words, to justify it, I will yet sing a song for you ma femme. MYSELF AND MINE. MYSELF and mine gymnastic ever, To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a boat, to manage horses, to beget superb
children,
To speak readily and clearly, to feel at home among common people,
And to hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea.
Not for an embroiderer, (There will always be plenty of embroiderers, I welcome them also),
But for the fibre of things and for inherent men and women.
Nor to chisel ornaments, But to chisel with free stroke the heads and limbs of plenteous supreme Gods, that the States may realise
them walking and talking.
Let me have my own way, Let others promulge the laws, I will make no account of the laws,
Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace, I hold up agitation and conflict,
I praise no eminent man, I rebuke to his face the one that was thought most worthy.
(Who are you? and what are you secretly guilty of all your life?
Will you turn aside all your life? will you grub and chatter all your life?
And who are you, blabbing by rote, years, pages, languages, reminiscences,
Unwitting to-day that you do not know how to speak properly a single word?)
Let others finish specimens, I never finish specimens, I start them by exhaustless laws as Nature does, fresh and modern continually.
I give nothing as duties, What others give as duties I give as living impulses, (Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?) Let others dispose of questions, I dispose of nothing, I arouse unanswerable questions,
Who are they I see and touch, and what about them? What about these likes of myself that draw me so close by tender directions and indirections?
I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies, as I myself do,
I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself,
I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,
I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free. After me, vista! O I see life is not short, but immeasurably long, I henceforth tread the world chaste, temperate, an early riser, a steady grower,
Every hour the semen of centuries, and still of centuries. I must follow up these continual lessons of the air, water, earth,
I perceive I have no time to lose. WITH ANTECEDENTS. WITH antecedents, With my fathers and mothers and the accumulations of past ages,
With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am,
With Egypt, India, Phenicia, Greece and Rome, With the Kelt, the Scandinavian, the Alb and the Saxon, [and journeys,
With antique maritime ventures, laws, artisanship, wars With the poet, the skald, the saga, the myth, and the oracle,
With the sale of slaves, with enthusiasts, with the troubadour, the crusader, and the monk,
With those old continents whence we have come to this new continent,
With the fading kingdoms and kings over there, With the fading religions and priests, With the small shores we look back to from our own large and present shores,
With countless years drawing themselves onward and arrived at these years, [year,
You and me arrived—America arrived and making this This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come. O but it is not the years—it is I, it is you, We touch all laws and tally all antecedents, We are the skald, the oracle, the monk and the knight, we easily include them and more,
We stand amid time beginningless and endless, we stand amid evil and good,
All swings around us, there is as much darkness as light, The very sun swings itself and its system of planets around us,
Its sun, and its again, all swing around us. As for me, (torn, stormy, amid these vehement days,) I have the idea of all, and am all and believe in all, I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true, I reject no part.
(Have I forgotten any part? any thing in the past? Come to me whoever and whatever, till I give you recognition.)
I respect Assyria, China, Teutonia, and the Hebrews, I adopt each theory, myth, god and demi-god,
I see that the old accounts, Bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception,
I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were,
And that to-day is what it must be, and that America is, And that to-day and America could no-how be better than they are.
In the name of these States and in your and my name, the Past,
And in the name of these States and in your and my name, the Present time.
I know that the past was great and the future will be great,
And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,
(For the sake of him I typify, for the common average man's sake, your sake if you are he,)
And that where I am or you are this present day, there is the centre of all days, all races,
And there is the meaning to us of all that has ever come of races and days, or ever will come.
___________ OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING. OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded,
barefoot,
Down from the shower'd halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, From the myriad thence-arous'd words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such as now they start the scene revisiting, As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. Once Paumanok, When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this sea-shore in some briers, Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together, And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth, great sun! While we bask, we two together. Two together! Winds blow south, or winds blow north, Day come white, or night come black, Home, or rivers and mountains from home, Singing all time, minding no time, While we two keep together. Till of a sudden, May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate, One forenoon the she-bird crouch'd not on the nest,
Nor return'd that afternoon, nor the next, Nor ever appear'd again. And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea, And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea, Or flitting from brier to brier by day, [he-bird, I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the The solitary guest from Alabama. Blow! blow! blow! Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore; I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me. Yes, when the stars glisten'd, All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake, Down almost amid the slapping waves, Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears. He call'd on his mate, He pour'd forth the meanings which I of all men know. Yes my brother I know, The rest might not, but I have treasur'd every note, For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding, Silent, avoiding the moonbeam, blending myself with the shadows.
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing, I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair, Listen'd long and long. Listen'd to keep, to sing, now translating the notes, Following you my brother.
Soothe! soothe! soothe! Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, [one close, And again another behind embracing and lapping, every But my love soothes not me, not me. Low hangs the moon, it rose late, It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love. O madly the sea pushes upon the land, With love, with love. O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the
breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white? Loud! loud! loud! Loud I call to you, my love! High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, Surely you must know who is here, is here, You must know who I am, my love. Low-hanging moon! What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow! O it is the shape, the shape of my mate! O moon do not keep her from me any longer. Land! land! O land! Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my
mate back again if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I
look.
O rising stars! Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with
some of you.
O throat! O trembling throat! Sound clearer through the atmosphere! Pierce the woods, the earth, Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want. Shake out carols! Solitary here, the night's carols! Carols of lonesome love! death's carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O under that moon where she droops almost down into the
sea!
O reckless despairing carols. But soft! sink low! Soft! let me just murmur, And do you wait a moment you husky-nois'd sea, For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to
me,
So faint, I must be still, be still to listen, But not altogether still, for then she might not come
immediately to me.
Hither my love! Here I am! here! With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you, This gentle call is for you my love, for you. Do not be decoy'd elsewhere, That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice, That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray, Those are the shadows of leaves. O darkness! O in vain! O I am very sick and sorrowful
O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon
the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea! O throat! O throbbing heart! And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night. O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more. The aria sinking, All else continuing, the stars shining, The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling, The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching,
The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria's meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing, The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering, The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying, To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard. Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.
O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me. O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more! A word then, (for I will conquer it,) The word final, superior to all, Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen; [sea-waves? Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? Whereto answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death, And again death, death, death, death Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death. Which I do not forget. But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother, That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs at random, My own songs awaked from that hour, And with them the key, the word up from the waves, The word of the sweetest song and all songs, That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper'd me. AS I EBB'D WITH THE OCEAN OF LIFE 1. As I ebb'd with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk'd where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,
Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,
Was seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.
Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows,
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk'd with that electric self seeking types. As I wend to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift. O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth, Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or
what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, [have written,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. You oceans both, I close with you, We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,
These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.
You friable shore with trails of debris, You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot, What is yours is mine my father. I too Paumanok, I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash'd on your shores,
I too am but a trail of drift and debris, I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.
I throw myself upon your breast my father, I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me, I hold you so firm till you answer me something. Kiss me my father, Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love, Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.
Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,) Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother, Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,
Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you.
I mean tenderly by you and all, I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine.
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy white, and bubbles, (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last, See, the prismatic colours glistening and rolling,) Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell, Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature, Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud- trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting, Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet. TO THE MAN-OF-WAR-BIRD. THOU who hast slept all night upon the storm, Waking renew'd on thy prodigious pinions, (Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended'st, And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,) Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating, As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee, (Myself a speck, a point on the world's floating vast.) Far, far at sea, After the night's fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks,
With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene, The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun, The limpid spread of air cerulean, Thou also reappearest. Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings), To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails, Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,
That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder- cloud,
In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul, What joys! what joys were thine! ABOARD AT A SHIP'S HELM. ABOARD at a ship's helm, A young steersman steering with care. Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing, An ocean-bell—O a warning bell, rock'd by the waves. O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place. For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gaily and safe.
But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging!
ON the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky. Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, And nigh at hand, only a very little above, Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades. From the beach the child holding the hand of her father, Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps. Weep not, child, Weep not, my darling, With these kisses let me remove your tears, The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.
The dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars? Something there is, (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper, I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirec- tion),
Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away), [Jupiter,
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades. THE WORLD BELOW THE BRINE. THE world below the brine, Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves, Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf,
Different colours, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as
so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE. ON the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colours, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
1. TO-DAY a rude brief recitative, Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,
Of unnamed heroes in the ships—of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach,
Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing, And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations, Fitful, like a surge. Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid sailors,
Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate can never surprise nor death dismay, [by thee,
Pick'd sparingly without noise by thee old ocean, chosen Thou sea that pickest and cullest the race in time, and unitest nations,
Suckled by thee, old husky nurse, embodying thee, Indomitable, untamed as thee. (Ever the heroes on water or on land, by ones or twos appearing,
Ever the stock preserv'd and never lost, though rare, enough for seed preserv'd.)
Flaunt out O sea your separate flags of nations! Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals! But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of man one flag above all the rest,
A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death,
Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates,
And all that went down doing their duty, Reminiscent of them, twined from all intrepid captains young or old,
A pennant universal, subtly waving all time, o'er all brave sailors,
All seas, all ships. PATROLLING BARNEGAT. WILD, wild the storm, and the sea high running, Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,
Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing, Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering, On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting, Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,
Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,
(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)
Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting, Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
That savage trinity warily watching.
AFTER the sea-ship, after the whistling winds, After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes, Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship, Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface,
Larger and smaller waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully flowing,
The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing and frolicsome under the sun,
A motley procession with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,
Following the stately and rapid ship, in the wake following.
___________ A BOSTON BALLAD. (1854.) TO get betimes in Boston town I rose this morning early, Here's a good place at the corner, I must stand and see the
show.Clear the way there Jonathan! Way for the President's marshal—way for the govern- ment cannon!
Way for the Federal foot and dragoons, (and the apparitions copiously tumbling.)
I love to look on the Stars and Stripes, I hope the fifes will play Yankee Doodle.
How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops! Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town.
A fog follows, antiques of the same come limping, Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless.
Why this is indeed a show—it has called the dead out of the earth!
The old graveyards of the hills have hurried to see! Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear! Cock'd hats of mothy mould—crutches made of mist! Arms in slings—old men leaning on young men's shoulders.
What troubles you Yankee phantoms? what is all this chattering of bare gums?
Does the ague convulse your limbs? do you mistake your crutches for firelocks and level them?
If you blind your eyes with tears you will not see the President's marshal,
If you groan such groans you might balk the government cannon.
For shame old maniacs—bring down those toss'd arms, and let your white hair be,
Here gape your great grandsons, their wives gaze at them from the windows,
See how well dress'd, see how orderly they conduct themselves.
Worse and worse—can't you stand it? are you retreating? Is this hour with the living too dead for you? Retreat then—pell-mell! To your graves—back—back to the hills old limpers! I do not think you belong here anyhow. But there is one thing that belongs here—shall I tell you what it is, gentlemen of Boston?
I will whisper it to the Mayor, he shall send a committee to England,
They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart to the royal vault,
Dig out King George's coffin, unwrap him quick from the grave-clothes, box up his bones for a journey,
Find a swift Yankee clipper—here is freight for you, black-bellied clipper,
Up with your anchor—shake out your sails—steer straight toward Boston Bay.
Now call for the President's marshal again, bring out the government cannon,
Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another procession, guard it with foot and dragoons.
This centre-piece for them; Look, all orderly citizens—look from the windows, women;
The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that will not stay,
Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the skull.
You have got your revenge, old buster—the crown is come to its own and more than its own.
Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan—you are a made man from this day,
You are mighty cute—and here is one of your bargains.
The 72nd and 73rd Years of The United States. SUDDENLY out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
Like lightning it le'pt forth half startled at itself, Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings.
O hope and faith! O aching close of exiled patriots' lives! O many a sicken'd heart! Turn back unto this day and make yourselves afresh. And you, paid to defile the People—you liars, mark! Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts, For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his simplicity the poor man's wages,
For many a promise sworn by royal lips and broken and laugh'd at in the breaking,
Then in their power not for all these did the blows strike revenge, or the heads of the nobles fall;
The People scorn'd the ferocity of kings. But the sweetness of mercy brew'd bitter destruction, and the frighten'd monarchs come back,
Each comes in state with his train, hangman, priest, tax-gatherer,
Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant. Yet behind all lowering stealing, lo, a shape, Vague as the night, draped interminably, head, front and form, in scarlet folds,
Whose face and eyes none may see,
Out of its robes only this, the red robes lifted by the arm, One finger crook'd pointed high over the top, like the head of a snake appears.
Meanwhile corpses lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men,
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh
aloud,
And all these things bear fruits, and they are good. Those corpses of young men, Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets, those hearts pierc'd by the gray lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem live elsewhere with unslaughter'd vitality.
They live in other young men O kings! They live in brothers again ready to defy you, They were purified by death, they were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of the murder'd for freedom but grows seed for freedom, in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,
But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering, counseling, cautioning.
Liberty, let others despair of you—I never despair of you.
Is the house shut? is the master away? Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching, He will soon return, his messengers come anon. WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN'D ASTRONOMER. WHEN I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. O ME! O LIFE! O ME! O life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
I SIT AND LOOK OUT. I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd to preserve the lives of the
rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon labourers, the poor, and upon negroes,
and the like;
All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
WHAT you give me I cheerfully accept, A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money, as I rendezvous with my poems,
A traveler's lodging and breakfast as journey through the States—why should I be ashamed to own such
gifts? why to advertise for them?
For I myself am not one who bestows nothing upon man and woman,
For I bestow upon any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of the universe.
THE DALLIANCE OF THE EAGLES. SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,) Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together, The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.
( After reading HEGEL.) ROAMING in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
A FARM PICTURE. THROUGH the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding, And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away. A CHILD'S AMAZE. SILENT and amazed even when a little boy, I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,
As contending against some being or influence. THE RUNNER. ON a flat road runs the well-train'd runner, He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs, He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs, With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd.
OF obedience, faith, adhesiveness; As I stand aloof and look there is to me something pro- foundly affecting in large masses of men following
the lead of those who do not believe in men.
THOUGHT. OF Justice—as if Justice could be any thing but the same ample law, expounded by natural judges and
saviours,
As if it might be this thing or that thing, according to decisions.
GLIDING O'ER ALL. GLIDING o'er all, through all, Through Nature, Time, and Space, As a ship on the waters advancing, The voyage of the soul—not life alone, Death, many deaths I'll sing. HAST NEVER COME TO THEE AN HOUR. HAST never come to thee an hour, A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth?
These eager business aims—books politics, art, amours, To utter nothingness?
WOMEN sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young.
MOTHER AND BABE. I SEE the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother, The sleeping mother and babe—hush'd, I study them long and long.
THOUGHT. OF Equality—as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—as if it were not
indispensable to my own rights that others possess
the same.
TO OLD AGE. I SEE in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea.
___________ FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE. FIRST O songs for a prelude, Lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum pride and joy in my city,
How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue, How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,
(O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless! O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)
How you sprang—how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent hand,
How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead,
How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of soldiers,)
How Manhattan drum-taps led. Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading, Forty years as a pageant, till unawares the lady of this teeming and turbulent city,
Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,
With her million children around her, suddenly, At dead of night, at news from the south, Incens'd struck with clinch'd hand the pavement. A shock electric, the night sustain'd it, Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour'd out its myriads.
From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,
Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming. To the drum-taps prompt, The young men falling in and arming, The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith's hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)
The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the court,
The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing the reins abruptly down on the
horses' backs,
The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all leaving; [arm,
Squads gather everywhere by common consent and The new recruits, even boys, the old men show them how to wear their accoutrements, they buckle the straps
carefully,
Outdoors arming, indoors arming, the flash of the musket-barrels,
The white tents cluster in camps, the arm'd sentries around, the sunrise cannon and again at sunset,
Arm'd regiments arrive every day, pass through the city, and embark from the wharves,
(How good they look as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with their guns on their shoulders!
How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces and their clothes and knapsacks cover'd
with dust!)
The blood of the city up—arm'd! arm'd! the cry every- where,
The flags flung out from the steeples of churches and from all the public buildings and stores,
The tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son kisses his mother,
(Loth is the mother to part, yet not a word does she speak to detain him,)
The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the way,
The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their favourites,
The artillery, the silent cannons bright as gold, drawn along, rumble lightly over the stones,
(Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence, Soon unlimber'd to begin the red business;) All the mutter of preparation, all the determin'd arming,
The hospital service, the lint, bandages and medicines, The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in earnest, no mere parade now;
War! an arm'd race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away;
War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm'd race is advancing to welcome it.
Mannahatta a-march—and it's O to sing it well! It's O for a manly life in the camp. And the sturdy artillery, The guns bright as gold, the work for giants, to serve well the guns,
Unlimber them! (no more as the past forty years for salutes for courtesies merely,
Put in something now besides powder and wadding.) And you lady of ships, you Mannahatta, Old matron of this proud, friendly, turbulent city, Often in peace and wealth you were pensive or covertly frown'd amid all your children,
But now you smile with joy exulting old Mannahatta. EIGHTEEN SIXTY-ONE. ARM'D year—year of the struggle, No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year,
Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,
But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder,
With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in the belt at your side,
As I heard you shouting loud, your sonorous voice ringing across the continent,
Your masculine voice O year, as rising amid the great cities,
Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you as one of the workmen, the dwellers in Manhattan,
Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and Indiana,
Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait and descending the Alleghanies,
Or down from the great lakes or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along the Ohio river,
Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at Chattanooga on the mountain top,
Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs clothed in blue, bearing weapons, robust year,
Heard your determin'd voice launch'd forth again and again,
Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round- lipp'd cannon,
I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year. BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS! BEAT! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, Into the school where the scholar is studying; Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers' bargains by day—no brokers or specu- lators—would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge? [blow.
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley—stop for no expostulation, Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer, Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
FROM PAUMANOK STARTING I FLY LIKE A BIRD. FROM Paumanok starting I fly like a bird, Around and around to soar to sing the idea of all, To the north betaking myself to sing there arctic songs, To Kanada till I absorb Kanada in myself, to Michigan then,
To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs, (they are inimitable;)
Then to Ohio and Indiana to sing theirs, to Missouri and Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs,
To Tennessee and Kentucky, to the Carolinas and Georgia to sing theirs,
To Texas and so along up toward California, to roam accepted everywhere;
To sing first, (to the tap of the war-drum if need be,) The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable, And then the song of each member of these States.
O a new song, a free song, Flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, by sounds, by voices clearer,
By the wind's voice and that of the drum, By the banner's voice and child's voice and sea's voice and father's voice,
Low on the ground and high in the air, On the ground where father and child stand, In the upward air where their eyes turn, Where the banner at daybreak is flapping. Words! book-words! what are you? Words no more, for hearken and see, My song is there in the open air, and I must sing, With the banner and pennant a-flapping. I'll weave the chord and twine in, Man's desire and babe's desire, I'll twine them in, I'll put in life,
I'll put the bayonet's flashing point, I'll let bullets and slugs whizz,
(As one carrying a symbol and menace far into the future,
Crying with trumpet voice, Arouse and beware! Beware
and arouse!)
I'll pour the verse with streams of blood, full of volition, full of joy,
Then loosen, launch forth, to go and compete, With the banner and pennant a-flapping.
Come up here, bard, bard, Come up here, soul, soul, Come up here, dear little child, To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light.
Father what is that in the sky beckoning to me with long finger?
And what does it say to me all the while? Nothing my babe you see in the sky, And nothing at all to you it says—but look you my babe,
Look at these dazzling things in the houses, and see you the money shops opening,
And see you the vehicles preparing to crawl along the streets with goods;
These, ah these, how valued and toil'd for these! How envied by all the earth. Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high, On floats the sea in distant blue careering through its channels,
On floats the wind over the breast of the sea setting in toward land,
The great steady wind from west or west-by-south, Floating so buoyant with milk-white foam on the waters.
But I am not the sea nor the red sun, I am not the wind with girlish laughter, Not the immense wind which strengthens, not the wind which lashes,
Not the spirit that ever lashes its own body to terror and death,
But I am that which-unseen comes and sings, sings, sings,
Which babbles in brooks and scoots in showers on the land,
Which the birds know in the woods mornings and evenings,
And the shore-sands know and the hissing wave, and that banner and pennant,
Aloft there flapping and flapping. O father it is alive—it is full of people—it has children, O now it seems to me it is talking to its children, I hear it—it talks to me—O it is wonderful! O it stretches—it spreads and runs so fast—O my father, It is so broad it covers the whole sky. Cease, cease, my foolish babe, What you are saying is sorrowful to me, much it displeases me;
Behold with the rest again I say, behold not banners and pennants aloft,
But the well-prepared pavements behold, and mark the solid-wall'd houses.
Speak to the child O bard out of Manhattan, To our children all, or north or south of Manhattan, Point this day, leaving all the rest, to us over all—and yet we know not why,
For what are we, mere strips of cloth profiting nothing, Only flapping in the wind? I hear and see not strips of cloth alone, I hear the tramp of armies, I hear the challenging sentry, I hear the jubilant shouts of millions of men, I hear Liberty!
I hear the drums beat and the trumpets blowing, I myself move abroad swift-rising flying then, I use the wings of the land-bird and use the wings of the sea-bird, and look down as from a height,
I do not deny the precious results of peace, I see populous cities with wealth incalculable,
I see numberless farms, I see the farmers working in their fields or barns,
I see mechanics working, I see buildings everywhere founded, going up, or finish'd,
I see trains of cars swiftly speeding along railroad tracks drawn by the locomotives,
I see the stores, depôts, of Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans,
I see far in the West the immense area of grain, I dwell awhile hovering,
I pass to the lumber forests of the North, and again to the Southern plantation, and again to California;
Sweeping the whole I see the countless profit, the busy gatherings, earn'd wages,
See the Identity formed out of thirty-eight spacious and haughty States, (and many more to come,)
See forts on the shores of harbours, see ships sailing in and out;
Then over all, (aye! aye!) my little and lengthen'd pennant shaped like a sword,
Runs swiftly up indicating war and defiance—and now the halyards have rais'd it,
Side of my banner broad and blue, side of my starry banner,
Discarding peace over all the sea and land. Yet louder, higher, stronger, bard! yet farther, wider cleave! [alone,
No longer let our children deem us riches and peace We may be terror and carnage, and are so now, Not now are we any one of these spacious and haughty States, (nor any five, nor ten,)
Nor market nor depôt we, nor money-bank in the city, But these and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines below, are ours,
And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small,
And the fields they moisten, and the crops and the fruits are ours,
Bays and channels and ships sailing in and out are ours— while we over all,
Over the area spread below, the three or four millions of square miles, the capitals,
The forty millions of people,—O bard! in life and death supreme,
We, even we, henceforth flaunt out masterful, high up above,
Not for the present alone, for a thousand years chanting through you,
This song to the soul of one poor little child. O my father I like not the houses, They will never to me be any thing, nor do I like money, But to mount up there I would like, O father dear, that banner I like,
That pennant I would be and must be. Child of mine you fill me with anguish, To be that pennant would be too fearful, Little you know what it is this day, and after this day, forever,
It is to gain nothing, but risk and defy every thing, Forward to stand in front of wars—and O, such wars!— what have you to do with them?
With passions of demons, slaughter, premature death? Demons and death then I sing, Put in all, aye all will I, sword-shaped pennant for war, And a pleasure new and ecstatic, and the prattled yearn- ing of children,
Blent with the sounds of the peaceful land and the liquid wash of the sea,
And the black ships fighting on the sea envelop'd in smoke,
And the icy cool of the far, far north, with rustling cedars and pines,
And the whirr of drums and the sound of soldiers marching, and the hot sun shining south,
And the beach-waves combing over the beach on my Eastern shore, and my Western shore the same,
And all between those shores, and my ever-running Mississippi with bends and chutes,
And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of Missouri,
The Continent, devoting the whole identity without reserving an atom,
Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all and the yield of all,
Fusing and holding, claiming, devouring the whole, No more with tender lip, nor musical labial sound, But out of the night emerging for good, our voice persuasive no more,
Croaking like crows here in the wind. My limbs, my veins dilate, my theme is clear at last, Banner so broad advancing out of the night, I sing you haughty and resolute,
I burst through where I waited long, too long, deafen'd and blinded,
My hearing and tongue are come to me, (a little child taught me,)
I hear from above O pennant of war your ironical call and demand, [banner!
Insensate! insensate! (yet I at any rate chant you,) O Not houses of peace indeed are you, nor any nor all their prosperity, (if need be, you shall again have
every one of those houses to destroy them,
You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money,
May they stand fast, then? not an hour except you above them and all stand fast;)
O banner, not money so precious are you, not farm produce you, nor the material good nutriment,
Nor excellent stores, nor landed on wharves from the ships,
Not the superb ships with sail-power or steam-power, fetching and carrying cargoes,
Nor machinery, vehicles, trade, nor revenues—but you as henceforth I see you,
Running up out of the night, bringing your cluster of stars, (ever-enlarging stars,)
Divider of daybreak you, cutting the air, touch'd by the sun, measuring the sky,
(Passionately seen and yearn'd for by one poor little child,
While others remain busy or smartly talking, forever teaching thrift, thrift;)
O you up there! O pennant! where you undulate like a snake hissing so curious,
Out of reach, an idea only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody death, loved by me,
So loved—O you banner leading the day with stars brought from the night!
Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all— (absolute owner of all)—O banner and pennant!
I too leave the rest—great as it is, it is nothing—houses, machines are nothing—I see them not,
I see but you, O warlike pennant! O banner so broad, with stripes, I sing you only,
Flapping up there in the wind.
DEEPS. RISE O days from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer sweep,
Long for my soul hungering gymnastic I devour'd what the earth gave me,
Long I roam'd amid the woods of the north, long I watch'd Niagara pouring,
I travell'd the prairies over and slept on their breast, I cross'd the Nevadas, I cross'd the plateaus,
I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail'd out to sea, [storm,
I sail'd through the storm, I was refresh'd by the I watch'd with joy the threatening maws of the waves, I mark'd the white combs where they career'd so high, curling over,
I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds, Saw from below what arose and mounted, (O superb! O wild as my heart, and powerful!)
Heard the continuous thunder as it bellow'd after the lightning,
Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning as sudden and fast amid the din they chased each
other across the sky;
These, and such as these, I, elate, saw—saw with wonder, yet pensive and masterful,
All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me, Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious. 'Twas well, O soul—'twas a good preparation you gave me,
Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill,
Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us,
Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities,
Something for us is pouring now more than Niagara pouring,
Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the Northwest are you indeed inexhaustible?)
What, to pavements and homesteads here, what were those storms of the mountains and sea?
What, to passions I witness around me to-day? was the sea risen?
Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?
Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage,
Manhattan rising, advancing with menacing front—Cin- cinnati, Chicago, unchain'd;
What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here, [dashes!
How it climbs with daring feet and hands—how it How the true thunder bellows after the lightning—how bright the flashes of lightning!
How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on, shown through the dark by those flashes of light-
ning!
(Yet a mournful wall and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,
In a lull of the deafening confusion.) Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! strike with venge- ful stroke!
And do you rise higher than ever yet O days, O cities!
Crash heavier, heavier yet O storms! you have done me good,
My soul prepared in the mountains absorbs your immor- tal strong nutriment,
Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads through farms, only half satisfied,
One doubt nauseous undulating like a snake, crawl'd on the ground before me,
Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low;
The cities I loved so well I abandon'd and left, I sped to the certainties suitable to me,
Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature's dauntlessness,
I refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only, I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire—on the water and air I waited long;
But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted, [cities electric,
I have witness'd the true lightning, I have witness'd my I have lived to behold man burst forth and warlike America rise,
Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds,
No more the mountains roam or sail the stormy sea. VIRGINIA—THE WEST. THE noble sire fallen on evil days, I saw with hand uplifted, menacing, brandishing, (Memories of old in abeyance, love and faith in abey- ance,)
The insane knife toward the Mother of All.
The noble son on sinewy feet advancing, I saw, out of the land of prairies, land of Ohio's waters and of Indiana,
To the rescue the stalwart giant hurry his plenteous offspring,
Drest in blue, bearing their trusty rifles on their shoulders.
Then the Mother of All with calm voice speaking, As to you Rebellious, (I seemed to hear her say,) why strive against me, and why seek my life?
When you yourself forever provide to defend me? For you provided me Washington—and now these also. CITY OF SHIPS. CITY of ships! (O the black ships! O the fierce ships! O the beautiful sharp-bow'd steam-ships and sail-ships!) City of the world! (for all races are here, All the lands of the earth make contributions here;) City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides! City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out with eddies and foam!
City of wharves and stores—city of tall façades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extrava- gant city!
Spring up O city—not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
Fear not—submit to no models but your own, O city! Behold me—incarnate me, as I have incarnated you!
I have rejected nothing you offer'd me—whom you adopted I have adopted,
Good or bad I never question you—I love all—I do not condemn any thing,
I chant and celebrate all that is yours—yet peace no more, [mine
In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is War, red war is my song through your streets, O city! CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD. A LINE in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person, a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white, The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind. BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE. I SEE before me now a traveling army halting, Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large- sized, flickering,
And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.
AN ARMY CORPS ON THE MARCH. WITH its cloud of skirmishers in advance, With now the sound of a single shot snapping like a whip, and now an irregular volley,
The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense brigades press on, [men,
Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun—the dust-cover'd In columns rise and fall to the undulations of the ground,
With artillery interspers'd—the wheels rumble, the horses sweat,
As the army corps advances. BY THE BIVOUAC'S FITFUL FLAME. BY the bivouac's fitful flame, A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow—but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline,
The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence, Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving, The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
By the bivouac's fitful flame. COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER. COME up from the fields father, here's a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here's a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, 'tis autumn, Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis'd vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines? Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.
Down in the fields all prospers well, But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter's call.
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.
Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling, [cap.
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her Open the envelope quickly, O this is not our son's writing, yet his name is sign'd, O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother's soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry
skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better. Ah now the single figure to me, Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans. Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
See dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay'd,)
better.
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already, The only son is dead. But the mother needs to be better, She with thin form presently drest in black, By day her meals untouch'd, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son. VIGIL STRANGE I KEPT ON THE FIELD ONE NIGHT. VIGIL strange I kept on the field one night; When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side
that day,
One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with
a look I shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach'd up as you
lay on the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested
battle,
Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I
made my way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your
body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth
responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool
blew the moderate night-wind,
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