TO SOAR IN FREEDOM AND IN FULLNESS OF POWER

I have not so much emulated the birds that musically sing,

I have abandon’d myself to flights, broad circles.

The hawk, the seagull, have far more possess’d me than the

canary or mocking-bird.

I have not felt to warble and trill, however sweetly,

I have felt to soar in freedom and in the fullness of power, joy,

volition.

THEN SHALL PERCEIVE

In softness, languor, bloom, and growth,

Thine eyes, ears, all thy sense—thy loftiest attribute—all that

takes cognizance of beauty,

Shall rouse and fill—then shall perceive!

THE FEW DROPS KNOWN

Of heroes, history, grand events, premises, myths, poems,

The few drops known must stand for oceans of the

unknown,

On this beautiful and thick peopl’d earth, here and there a little

specimen put on record,

A little of Greeks and Romans, a few Hebrew canticles, a few

death odors as from graves, from Egypt—

What are they to the long and copious retrospect of

antiquity?

ONE THOUGHT EVER AT THE FORE

One thought ever at the fore—

That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space,

All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are

bound to the same destination.

WHILE BEHIND ALL FIRM AND ERECT

While behind all, firm and erect as ever,

Undismay’d amid the rapids—amid the irresistible and deadly

urge,

Stands a helmsman, with brow elate and strong hand.

A KISS TO THE BRIDE ⁹

Marriage of Nelly Grant, May 21, 1874.

Sacred, blithesome, undenied,

With benisons from East and West,

And salutations North and South,

Through me indeed to-day a million hearts and hands,

Wafting a million loves, a million soul felt prayers;

—Tender and true remain the arm that shields thee!

Fair winds always fill the ship’s sails that sail thee!

Clear sun by day, and light stars at night, beam on thee!

Dear girl—through me the ancient privilege too,

For the New World, through me, the old, old wedding

greeting:

O youth and health! O sweet Missouri rose! O bonny bride!

Yield thy red cheeks, thy lips, to-day,

Unto a Nation’s loving kiss.

NAY, TELL ME NOT TO-DAY THE PUBLISH’D SHAME ¹⁰

Winter of 1873, Congress in Session.

Nay, tell me not to-day the publish’d shame,

Read not to-day the journal’s crowded page,

The merciless reports still branding forehead after forehead,

The guilty column following guilty column.

To-day to me the tale refusing,

Turning from it—from the white capitol turning,

Far from these swelling domes, topt with statues,

More endless, jubilant, vital visions rise

Unpublish‘d, unreported.

Through all your quiet ways, or North or South, you Equal States,

you honest farms,

Your million untold manly healthy lives, or East or West, city or

country,

Your noiseless mothers, sisters, wives, unconscious of their

good,

Your mass of homes nor poor nor rich, in visions rise—(even your

excellent poverties,)

Your self-distilling, never-ceasing virtues, self-denials, graces,

Your endless base of deep integrities within, timid but certain,

Your blessings steadily bestow‘d, sure as the light, and still,

(Plunging to these as a determin’d diver down the deep hidden

waters),

These, these to-day I brood upon—all else refusing, these will I

con,

To-day to these give audience.

SUPPLEMENT HOURS

Sane, random, negligent hours,

Sane, easy, culminating hours,

After the flush, the Indian summer, of my life,

Away from Books—away from Art—the lesson learn‘d, pass’d

o’er,

Soothing, bathing, merging all—the sane, magnetic,

Now for the day and night themselves—the open air,

Now for the fields, the seasons, insects, trees—the rain and

snow,

Where wild bees flitting hum,

Or August mulleins grow, or winter’s snowflakes fall,

Or stars in the skies roll round—

The silent sun and stars.

OF MANY A SMUTCH’D DEED REMINISCENT

Full of wickedness, I—of many a smutch’d deed reminiscent—of

worse deeds capable,

Yet I look composedly upon nature, drink day and night the joys

of life, and await death with perfect equanimity,

Because of my tender and boundless love for him I love and

because of his boundless love for me.

TO BE AT ALL

(Cf. Stanza 27, Song of Myself)

To be at all—what is better than that?

I think if there were nothing more developed, the clam in its

callous shell in the sand were august enough.

I am not in any callous shell;

I am cased with supple conductors, all over

They take every object by the hand, and lead it within me;

They are thousands, each one with his entry to himself;

They are always watching with their little eyes, from my head to

my feet;

One no more than a point lets in and out of me such bliss and

magnitude,

I think I could lift the girder of the house away if it lay between

me and whatever I wanted.

DEATH’S VALLEY ¹¹

To accompany a picture; by request. “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” from the painting by George Inness.

Nay, do not dream, designer dark,

Thou hast portray’d or hit thy theme entire;

I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having

glimpses of it,

Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol

too.

For I have seen many wounded soldiers die,

After dread suffering—have seen their lives pass off with

smiles;

And I have watch’d the death-hours of the old; and seen the

infant die;

The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors;

And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty;

And I myself for long, O Death, have breath’d my every breath

Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.

And out of these and thee,

I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee,

Nor gloom’s ravines, nor bleak, nor dark—for I do not fear thee,

Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),

Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling

tides, and trees and flowers and grass,

And the low hum of living breeze—and in the midst God’s

beautiful eternal right hand,

Thee, holiest minister of Heaven—thee, envoy, usherer, guide at

last of all,

Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call’d life,

Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.

ON THE SAME PICTURE ¹²

Intended for first stanza of “Death’s Valley.”

Aye, well I know ‘tis ghastly to descend that valley:

Preachers, musicians, poets, painters, always render it,

Philosophs exploit—the battlefield, the ship at sea, the myriad

beds, all lands,

All, all the past have enter’d, the ancientest humanity we know,

Syria‘s, India’s, Egypt‘s, Greece’s, Rome’s;

Till now for us under our very eyes spreading the same to-day,

Grim, ready, the same to-day, for entrance, yours and mine,

Here, here ‘tis limn’d.

A THOUGHT OF COLUMBUS ¹³

The mystery of mysteries, the crude and hurried ceaseless flame,

spontaneous, bearing on itself.

The bubble and the huge, round, concrete orb!

A breath of Deity, as thence the bulging universe unfolding!

The many issuing cycles from their precedent minute!

The eras of the soul incepting in an hour,

Haply the widest, farthest evolutions of the world and man.

Thousands and thousands of miles hence, and now four centuries

back,

A mortal impulse thrilling its brain cell,

Reck’d or unreck‘d, the birth can no longer be postpon’d:

A phantom of the moment, mystic, stalking, sudden,

Only a silent thought, yet toppling down of more than walls of

brass or stone.

(A flutter at the darkness’ edge as if old Time’s and Space’s secret

near revealing.)

A thought! a definite thought works out in shape.

Four hundred years roll on.

The rapid cumulus—trade, navigation, war, peace, democracy,

roll on;

The restless armies and the fleets of time following their leader—

the old camps of ages pitch’d in newer, larger areas,

The tangl’d, long-deferr’d eclaircissement of human life and,

hopes boldly begins untying,

As here to-day up-grows the Western World.

(An added word yet to my song, far Discoverer, as ne‘er before

sent back to son of earth—

If still thou hearest, hear me,

Voicing as now—lands, races, arts, bravas to thee,

O’er the long backward path to thee-one vast consensus, north,

south, east, west,

Soul plaudits! acclamation! reverent echoes!

One manifold, huge memory to thee! oceans and lands!

The modern world to thee and thought of thee!)

Outdoors, sitting, with cane—71 years old, 1890, photo taken by Dr. John

Johnston on a wharf in Camden, New Jersey. Courtesy of the Bayley-

WhitmanCollection of Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio,

and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, Huntington,

New York. Saunders #109.