AUTUMN RIVULETS⁷⁶

AS CONSEQUENT, ETC.⁷⁷

As consequent from store of summer rains,

Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,

Or many a herb-lined brook’s reticulations,

Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,

Songs of continued years I sing.

 

Life’s ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend,

With the old streams of death.)

 

Some threading Ohio’s farm-fields or the woods,

Some down Colorado’s canons from sources of perpetual snow,

Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,

Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa,

Some to Atlantica’s bays, and so to the great salt brine.

 

In you whoe‘er you are my book perusing,

In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,

All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

 

Currents for starting a continent new,

Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,

Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves,

(Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous’d and ominous too,

Out of the depths the storm’s abysmic waves, who knows whence?

Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter’d sail.)

 

Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring,

A windrow-drift of weeds and shells.

O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless,

Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held,

Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity’s music faint and far,

Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica’s rim, strains for the soul of the

prairies,

Whisper’d reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously

sounding,

Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable,

Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,

(For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,)

These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry,

Wash’d on America’s shores?

THE RETURN OF THE HEROES

-1-

For the lands and for these passionate days and for myself,

Now I awhile retire to thee O soil of autumn fields,

Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee,

Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,

Tuning a verse for thee.

 

O earth that hast no voice, confide to me a voice,

O harvest of my lands—O boundless summer growths,

O lavish brown parturient earth—O infinite teeming womb,

A song to narrate thee.

-2-

Ever upon this stage,

Is acted God’s calm annual drama,

Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,

Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,

The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong

waves,

The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,

The liliput countless armies of the grass,

The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages,

The scenery of the snows, the winds’ free orchestra,

The stretching light-hung roof of clouds, the clear cerulean and

the silvery fringes,

The high dilating stars, the placid beckoning stars,

The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows,

The shows of all the varied lands and all the growths and products.

-3-

Fecund America—to-day,

Thou art all over set in births and joys!

Thou groan‘st with riches, thy wealth clothes thee as a swathing-

garment,

Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions,

A myriad twining life like interlacing vines binds all thy vast

demesne,

As some huge ship freighted to water’s edge thou ridest into port,

As rain falls from the heaven and vapors rise from earth, so have

the precious values fallen upon thee and risen out of thee;

Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle!

Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty,

Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,

Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle and lookest out

upon thy world, and lookest East and lookest West,

Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles, a million

farms, and missest nothing,

Thou all-acceptress—thou hospitable, (thou only art hospitable as

God is hospitable.)

-4-

When late I sang sad was my voice,

Sad were the shows around me with deafening noises of hatred

and smoke of war;

In the midst of the conflict, the heroes, I stood,

Or pass’d with slow step through the wounded and dying.

But now I sing not war,

Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps,

Nor the regiments hastily coming up deploying in line of

battle;

No more the sad, unnatural shows of war.

 

Ask’d room those flush’d immortal ranks, the first forth-stepping

armies?

Ask room alas the ghastly ranks, the armies dread that

follow’d.

 

 

(Pass, pass, ye proud brigades, with your tramping sinewy legs,

With your shoulders young and strong, with your knapsacks and

your muskets;

How elate I stood and watch’d you, where starting off you

march’d.

 

 

Pass—then rattle drums again,

For an army heaves in sight, O another gathering army,

Swarming, trailing on the rear, O you dread accruing army,

O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea, with your

fever,

O my land’s maim’d darlings, with the plenteous bloody bandage

and the crutch,

Lo, your pallid army follows.)

-5-

But on these days of brightness,

On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and

lanes, the high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and

barns,

Should the dead intrude?

 

 

Ah the dead to me mar not, they fit well in Nature,

They fit very well in the landscape under the trees

and grass,

And along the edge of the sky in the horizon’s far margin.

Nor do I forget you Departed,

Nor in winter or summer my lost ones,

But most in the open air as now when my soul is rapt and at

peace, like pleasing phantoms,

Your memories rising glide silently by me.

-6-

I saw the day the return of the heroes,

(Yet the heroes never surpass’d shall never return,

Them that day I saw not.)

 

I saw the interminable corps, I saw the processions of armies,

I saw them approaching, defiling by with divisions,

Streaming northward, their work done, camping awhile in

clusters of mighty camps.

 

No holiday soldiers—youthful, yet veterans,

Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and

workshop,

Harden’d of many a long campaign and sweaty march,

Inured on many a hard-fought bloody field.

 

A pause—the armies wait,

A million flush’d embattled conquerors wait,

The world too waits, then soft as breaking night and sure as

dawn,

They melt, they disappear,

 

Exult O lands! victorious lands!

Not there your victory on those red shuddering fields,

But here and hence your victory.

 

Melt, melt away ye armies—disperse ye blue-clad soldiers,

Resolve ye back again, give up for good your deadly arms,

Other the arms the fields henceforth for you, or South or

North,

With saner wars, sweet wars, life-giving wars.

-7-

Loud O my throat, and clear O soul!

The season of thanks and the voice of full-yielding,

The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.

 

All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me,

I see the true arenas of my race, or first or last,

Man’s innocent and strong arenas.

 

I see the heroes at other toils,

I see well-wielded in their hands the better weapons.

 

I see where the Mother of All,

With full-spanning eye gazes forth, dwells long,

And counts the varied gathering of the products.

 

Busy the far, the sunlit panorama,

Prairie, orchard, and yellow grain of the North,

Cotton and rice of the South and Louisianian cane,

Open unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy,

Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine,

And many a stately river flowing and many a jocund brook,

And healthy uplands with herby-perfumed breezes,

And the good green grass, that delicate miracle the ever-recurring

grass.

-8-

Toil on heroes! harvest the products!

Not alone on those warlike fields the Mother of All,

With dilated form and lambent eyes watch’d you.

 

Toil on heroes! toil well! handle the weapons well!

The Mother of All, yet here as ever she watches you.

 

Well-pleased America thou beholdest,

Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters,

The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements;

Beholdest moving in every direction imbued as with life the

revolving hay-rakes,

The steam-power reaping-machines and the horse-power

machines,

The engines, thrashers of grain and cleaners of grain, well

separating the straw, the nimble work of the patent

pitchfork,

Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin, and the

rice-cleanser.

Beneath thy look O Maternal,

With these and else and with their own strong hands the heroes

harvest.

 

All gather and all harvest,

Yet but for thee O Powerful, not a scythe might swing as now in

security,

Not a maize-stalk dangle as now its silken tassels in peace.

 

Under thee only they harvest, even but a wisp of hay under thy

great face only,

Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every barbed spear

under thee,

Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, each ear in

its light-green sheath,

Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil

barns,

Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan,

to theirs;

Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama, dig and hoard

the golden the sweet potato of Georgia and the Carolinas,

Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania,

Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp or tobacco in the

Borders,

Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees or

bunches of grapes from the vines,

Or aught that ripens in all these States or North or South,

Under the beaming sun and under thee.

THERE WAS A CHILD WENT FORTH

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part

of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

 

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red

clover, and the song of the phœbe-bird,

And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and

the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf,

And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond

side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and

the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became

part of him.

 

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part

of him,

Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn, and the

esculent roots of the garden,

And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms and the fruit afterward,

and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road,

And the old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the

tavern whence he had lately risen,

And the schoolmistress that pass’d on her way to the school,

And the friendly boys that pass‘d, and the quarrelsome boys,

And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls, and the barefoot negro boy

and girl,

And all the changes of city and country wherever he went.

 

His own parents, he that had father’d him and she that had

conceiv’d him in her womb and birth’d him,

They give this child more of themselves than that,

They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.

The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the supper-

table,

The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a

wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she

walks by,

The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger‘d,

unjust,

The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty

lure,

The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the

yearning and swelling heart,

Affection that will not be gainsay’d, the sense of what is real, the

thought if after all it should prove unreal,

The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious

whether and how,

Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and

specks?

Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not

flashes and specks what are they?

The streets themselves and the façades of houses, and goods in

the windows,

Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank’d wharves, the huge crossing at

the ferries,

The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river

between,

Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of

white or brown two miles off,

The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little

boat slack-tow’d astern,

The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,

The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint

away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies

motionless in,

The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt

marsh and shore mud,

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and

who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

OLD IRELAND⁷⁸

Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,

Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother,

Once a queen, now lean and tatter’d seated on the ground,

Her old white hair drooping dishevel’d round her shoulders,

At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,

Long silent, she too long silent, mourning her shrouded hope and

heir,

Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full

of love.

 

 

Yet a word ancient mother,

You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with

forehead between your knees,

O you need not sit there veil’d in your old white hair so

dishevel‘d,

For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave,

It was an illusion, the son you love was not really dead,

The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in

another country,

Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave,

What you wept for was translated, pass’d from the grave,

The winds favor’d and the sea sail’d it,

And now with rosy and new blood,

Moves to-day in a new country.

THE CITY DEAD-HOUSE

By the city dead-house by the gate,

As idly sauntering wending my way from the clangor,

I curious pause, for lo, an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute

brought,

Her corpse they deposit unclaim‘d, it lies on the damp brick

pavement,

The divine woman, her body, I see the body, I look on it alone,

That house once full of passion and beauty, all else I notice not,

Nor stillness so cold, nor running water from faucet, nor odors

morbific impress me,

But the house alone—that wondrous house—that delicate fair

house—that ruin!

That immortal house more than all the rows of dwellings ever

built!

Or white-domed capitol with majestic figure surmounted, or all

the old high-spired cathedrals,

That little house alone more than them all—poor, desperate

house!

Fair, fearful wreck—tenement of a soul—itself a soul,

Unclaim’d, avoided house—take one breath from my tremulous

lips,

Take one tear dropt aside as I go for thought of you,

Dead house of love—house of madness and sin, crumbled,

crush‘d,

House of life, erewhile talking and laughing—but ah, poor house,

dead even then,

Months, years, an echoing, garnish’d house—but dead, dead,

dead.

THIS COMPOST

-1-

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,

I withdraw from the still woods I loved,

I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,

I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to

renew me.

 

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

How can you be alive you growths of spring?

How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards,

grain?

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?

Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

 

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?

Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?

Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?

I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv‘d,

I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through

the sod and turn it up underneath,

I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

-2-

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet

behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,

The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,

The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its

graves,

The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,

The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit

on their nests,

The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,

The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow,

the colt from the mare,

Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the

dooryards,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those

strata of sour dead.

 

 

What chemistry!

That the winds are really not infectious,

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which

is so amorous after me,

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its

tongues,

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited

themselves in it,

That all is clean forever and forever,

That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,

That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,

That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that

melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,

That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,

Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a

catching disease.

 

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless

successions of diseas’d corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual,

sumptuous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings

from them at last.

TO A FOIL’D EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONAIRE

Courage yet, my brother or my sister!

Keep on—Liberty is to be subserv’d whatever occurs;

That is nothing that is quell’d by one or two failures, or any

number of failures,

Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any

unfaithfulness,

Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.

What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,

Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is

positive and composed, knows no discouragement,

Waiting patiently, waiting its time.

(Not songs of loyalty alone are these,

But songs of insurrection also,

For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over,

And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,

And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.)

 

The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance

and retreat,

The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,

The prison, scaffold, garroté, handcuffs, iron necklace and lead

balls do their work,

The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,

The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant

lands,

The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their

own blood,

The young men droop their eyelashes toward the ground when

they meet;

But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the

infidel enter’d into full possession.

When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the

second or third to go,

It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

 

When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,

And when all life and all the souls of men and women are

discharged from any part of the earth,

Then only shall liberty or the idea of liberty be discharged from

that part of the earth,

And the infidel come into full possession.

 

Then courage European revolter, revoltress!

For till all ceases neither must you cease.

 

I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for

myself, nor what any thing is for,)

But I will search carefully for it even in being foil‘d,

In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment—for they too

are great.

Did we think victory great?

So it is—but now it seems to me, when it cannot be help‘d, that

defeat is great,

And that death and dismay are great.

UNNAMED LANDS

Nations ten thousand years before these States, and many times

ten thousand years before these States,

Garner’d clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up

and travel’d their course and pass’d on,

What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes

and nomads,

What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,

What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,

What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and

phrenology,

What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of

death and the soul,

Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish

and undevelop‘d,

Not a mark, not a record remains—and yet all remains.

 

O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any

more than we are for nothing,

I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as

much as we now belong to it.

 

Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,

Some with oval countenances learn’d and calm,

Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects,

Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,

Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,

laboring, reaping, filling barns,

Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,

libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.

Are those billions of men really gone?

Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?

Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?

Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves?

 

I believe of all those men and women that fill’d the unnamed

lands, every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible

to us,

In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out of

what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn‘d, in life.

 

I believe that was not the end of those nations or any person of

them, any more than this shall be the end of my nation, or of

me;

Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products,

games, wars, manners, crimes, prisons, slaves, heroes, poets,

I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen world,

counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world,

I suspect I shall meet them there,

I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed

lands.

SONG OF PRUDENCE⁷⁹

Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d pondering,

On Time, Space, Reality—on such as these, and abreast with

them Prudence.

 

 

The last explanation always remains to be made about

prudence,

Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that

suits immortality.

 

The soul is of itself,

All verges to it, all has reference to what ensues,

All that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence,

Not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in

a day, month, any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of

death,

But the same affects him or her onward afterward through the

indirect lifetime.

 

 

The indirect is just as much as the direct,

The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the

body, if not more.

 

Not one word or deed, not venereal sore, discoloration, privacy of

the onanist,

Putridity of gluttons or rum-drinkers, peculation, cunning,

betrayal, murder, seduction, prostitution,

But has results beyond death as really as before death.

 

Charity and personal force are the only investments worth any thing.

 

No specification is necessary, all that a male or female does, that is

vigorous, benevolent, clean, is so much profit to him or her,

In the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole

scope of it forever.

 

Who has been wise receives interest,

Savage, felon, President, judge, farmer, sailor, mechanic, literat,

young, old, it is the same,

The interest will come round—all will come round.

 

Singly, wholly, to affect now, affected their time, will forever affect,

all of the past and all of the present and all of the future,

All the brave actions of war and peace,

All help given to relatives, strangers, the poor, old, sorrowful,

young children, widows, the sick, and to shunn’d persons,

All self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw

others fill the seats of the boats,

All offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a

friend’s sake, or opinion’s sake,

All pains of enthusiasts scoffd at by their neighbors,

All the limitless sweet love and precious suffering of mothers,

All honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded,

All the grandeur and good of ancient nations whose fragments we

inherit,

All the good of the dozens of ancient nations unknown to us by

name, date, location,

All that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no,

All suggestions of the divine mind of man or the divinity of his

mouth, or the shaping of his great hands,

All that is well thought or said this day on any part of the globe,

or on any of the wandering stars, or on any of the fix’d stars,

by those there as we are here,

All that is henceforth to be thought or done by you whoever you

are, or by any one,

These inure, have inured, shall inure, to the identities from which

they sprang, or shall spring.

 

Did you guess any thing lived only its moment?

The world does not so exist, no parts palpable or impalpable so

exist,

No consummation exists without being from some long previous

consummation, and that from some other,

Without the farthest conceivable one coming a bit nearer the

beginning than any.

 

Whatever satisfies souls is true;

Prudence entirely satisfies the craving and glut of souls,

Itself only finally satisfies the soul,

The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every

lesson but its own.

 

 

Now I breathe the word of the prudence that walks abreast with

time, space, reality,

That answers the pride which refuses every lesson but its own.

 

What is prudence is indivisible,

Declines to separate one part of life from every part,

Divides not the righteous from the unrighteous or the living from

the dead,

Matches every thought or act by its correlative,

Knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement,

Knows that the young man who composedly peril’d his life

and lost it has done exceedingly well for himself without

doubt,

That he who never peril’d his life, but retains it to old age in

riches and ease, has probably achiev’d nothing for himself

worth mentioning,

Knows that only that person has really learn’d who has learn’d to

prefer results,

Who favors body and soul the same,

Who perceives the indirect assuredly following the direct,

Who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries nor

avoids death.

THE SINGER IN THE PRISON⁸⁰

-1-

O sight of pity, shame and dole! O fearful thought—a convict soul.

 

Rang the refrain along the hall, the prison,

Rose to the roof, the vaults of heaven above,

Pouring in floods of melody in tones so pensive sweet and strong

the like whereof was never heard,

Reaching the far-off sentry and the armed guards, who ceas’d their

pacing,

Making the hearer’s pulses stop for ecstasy and awe.

-2-

The sun was low in the west one winter day,

When down a narrow aisle amid the thieves and outlaws of the

land,

(There by the hundreds seated, sear-faced murderers, wily

counterfeiters,

Gather’d to Sunday church in prison walls, the keepers round,

Plenteous, well-armed, watching with vigilant eyes,)

Calmly a lady walk’d holding a little innocent child by either

hand,

Whom seating on their stools beside her on the platform,

She, first preluding with the instrument a low and musical prelude,

In voice surpassing all, sang forth a quaint old hymn.

 

A soul confined by bars and bands,

Cries, help! O help! and wrings her hands,

Blinded her eyes, bleeding her breast,

Nor pardon finds, nor balm of rest.

 

Ceaseless she paces to and fro,

O heart-sick days! O nights of woe!

Nor hand of friend, nor loving face,

Nor favor comes, nor word of grace.

 

It was not I that sinn’d the sin,

The ruthless body dragg’d me in;

Though long I strove courageously,

The body was too much for me.

 

 

Dear prison’d soul bear up a space,

For soon or late the certain grace;

To set thee free and bear thee home,

The heavenly pardoner death shall come.

 

Convict no more, nor shame, nor dole! Depart—a God enfranchis’d soul!

-3-

The singer ceas‘d,

One glance swept from her clear calm eyes o’er all those upturn’d

faces,

Strange sea of prison faces, a thousand varied, crafty, brutal,

seam’d and beauteous faces,

Then rising, passing back along the narrow aisle between them,

While her gown touch’d them rustling in the silence,

She vanish’d with her children in the dusk.

 

 

While upon all, convicts and armed keepers ere they stirr‘d,

(Convict forgetting prison, keeper his loaded pistol,)

A hush and pause fell down a wondrous minute,

With deep half-stifled sobs and sound of bad men bow’d and

moved to weeping,

And youth’s convulsive breathings, memories of home,

The mother’s voice in lullaby, the sister’s care, the happy childhood,

The long-pent spirit rous’d to reminiscence;

A wondrous minute then—but after in the solitary night, to many,

many there,

Years after, even in the hour of death, the sad refrain, the tune,

the voice, the words,

Resumed, the large calm lady walks the narrow aisle,

The wailing melody again, the singer in the prison sings,

 

O sight of pity, shame and dole! O fearful thought—a convict soul.

WARBLE FOR LILAC-TIME

Warble me now for joy of lilac-time, (returning in reminiscence,)

Sort me O tongue and lips for Nature’s sake, souvenirs of earliest

summer,

Gather the welcome signs, (as children with pebbles or stringing

shells,)

Put in April and May, the hylas croaking in the ponds, the elastic

air,

Bees, butterflies, the sparrow with its simple notes,

Blue-bird and darting swallow, nor forget the high-hole flashing

his golden wings,

The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor,

Shimmer of waters with fish in them, the cerulean above,

All that is jocund and sparkling, the brooks running,

The maple woods, the crisp February days and the sugar-making,

The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted,

With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,

Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building the nest

of his mate,

The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its yellow-

green sprouts,

For spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is this in it

and from it?

Thou, soul, unloosen‘d—the restlessness after I know not what;

Come, let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away!

O if one could but fly like a bird!

O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship!

To glide with thee O soul, o’er all, in all, as a ship o‘er the waters;

Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the grass, the

morning drops of dew,

The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves,

Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called innocence,

Samples and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their atmo

sphere,

To grace the bush I love—to sing with the birds,

A warble for joy of lilac-time, returning in reminiscence.

OUTLINES FOR A TOMB

(G.P., Buried 1870)

-1-

What may we chant, O thou within this tomb?

What tablets, outlines, hang for thee, O millionaire?

The life thou lived‘st we know not,

But that thou walk’dst thy years in barter, ‘mid the haunts of

brokers,

Nor heroism thine, nor war, nor glory.

-2-

Silent, my soul,

With drooping lids, as waiting, ponder‘d,

Turning from all the samples, monuments of heroes.

 

While through the interior vistas,

Noiseless uprose, phantasmic, (as by night Auroras of the north,)

Lambent tableaus, prophetic, bodiless scenes,

Spiritual projections.

In one, among the city streets a laborer’s home appear‘d,

After his day’s work done, cleanly, sweet-air’d, the gaslight burning,

The carpet swept and a fire in the cheerful stove.

 

In one, the sacred parturition scene,

A happy painless mother birth’d a perfect child.

 

In one, at a bounteous morning meal,

Sat peaceful parents with contented sons.

 

In one, by twos and threes, young people,

Hundreds concentring, walk’d the paths and streets and roads,

Toward a tall-domed school.

 

 

In one a trio beautiful,

Grandmother, loving daughter, loving daughter’s daughter, sat,

Chatting and sewing.

 

In one, along a suite of noble rooms,

‘Mid plenteous books and journals, paintings on the walls, fine

statuettes,

Were groups of friendly journeymen, mechanics young and old,

Reading, conversing.

 

All, all the shows of laboring life,

City and country, women‘s, men’s and children’s,

Their wants provided for, hued in the sun and tinged for once

with joy,

Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-

room,

Labor and toil, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college,

The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught,

The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father’d and

mother‘d,

The hungry fed, the houseless housed;

(The intentions perfect and divine,

The workings, details, haply human.)

-3-

O thou within this tomb,

From thee such scenes, thou stintless, lavish giver,

Tallying the gifts of earth, large as the earth,

Thy name an earth, with mountains, fields and tides.

 

Nor by your streams alone, you rivers,

By you, your banks Connecticut,

By you and all your teeming life old Thames,

By you Potomac laving the ground Washington trod, by you

Patapsco,

You Hudson, you endless Mississippi—nor you alone,

But to the high seas launch, my thought, his memory.

OUT FROM BEHIND THIS MASK

(To Confront a Portrait)

—1—

Out from behind this bending rough-cut mask,

These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,

This common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in you

for you, in each for each,

(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—0 heaven!

The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)

This glaze of God’s serenest purest sky,

This film of Satan’s seething pit,

This heart’s geography’s map, this limitless small continent, this

soundless sea;

Out from the convolutions of this globe,

This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter,

Venus, Mars,

This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only

universe,

Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;)

These burin’d eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time,

To launch and spin through space revolving sideling, from these

to emanate,

To you whoe‘er you are—a look.

—2—

A traveler of thoughts and years, of peace and war,

Of youth long sped and middle age declining,

(As the first volume of a tale perused and laid away, and this the

second,

Songs, ventures, speculations, presently to close,)

Lingering a moment here and now, to you I opposite turn,

As on the road or at some crevice door by chance, or open’d

window,

Pausing, inclining, baring my head, you specially I greet,

To draw and clinch your soul for once inseparably with mine,

Then travel travel on.

VOCALISM

—1—

Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine

power to speak words;

Are you full-lung’d and limber-lipp’d from long trial? from

vigorous practice? from physique?

Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?

Come duly to the divine power to speak words?

For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship,

procreation, prudence, and nakedness,

After treading ground and breasting river and lake,

After a loosen’d throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,

after knowledge, freedom, crimes,

After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing

obstructions,

After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a

woman, the divine power to speak words;

Then toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten all—none

refuse, all attend,

Armies, ships, antiquities, libraries, paintings, machines, cities,

hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form in

close ranks,

They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through

the mouth of that man or that woman.

—2—

O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?

Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall

follow,

As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere

around the globe.

 

All waits for the right voices;

Where is the practis’d and perfect organ? where is the develop’d

soul?

For I see every word utter’d thence has deeper, sweeter, new

sounds, impossible on less terms.

 

I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples unstruck,

Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to

unclose,

Until that comes which has the quality to bring forth what lies

slumbering forever ready in all words.

TO HIM THAT WAS CRUCIFIED

My spirit to yours dear brother,

Do not mind because many sounding your name do not

understand you,

I do not sound your name, but I understand you,

I specify you with joy O my comrade to salute you, and to salute

those who are with you, before and since, and those to come

also,

That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and

succession,

We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,

We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,

Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,

We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the

disputers nor any thing that is asserted,

We hear the bawling and din, we are reach’d at by divisions,

jealousies, recriminations on every side,

They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade,

Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up

and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and

the diverse eras,

Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of

races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as

we are.

YOU FELONS ON TRIAL IN COURTS

You felons on trial in courts,

You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain’d and

handcuffed with iron,

Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison?

Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain’d

with iron, or my ankles with iron?

 

You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs or obscene in your

rooms,

Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself?

 

O culpable! I acknowledge—I exposé!

(0 admirers, praise not me-compliment not me-you make me

wince,

I see what you do not- I know what you do not.)

 

Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch’d and choked,

Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell’s tides continually

run,

Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,

I walk with delinquents with passionate love,

I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes

myself,

And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny

myself?

LAWS FOR CREATIONS

Laws for creations,

For strong artists and leaders, for fresh broods of teachers and

perfect literats for America,

For noble savans and coming musicians.

 

All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the

compact truth of the world,

There shall be no subject too pronounced—all works shall

illustrate the divine law of indirections.

 

 

What do you suppose creation is?

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and

own no superior?

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways,

but that man or woman is as good as God?

And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?

And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally

mean?

And that you or any one must approach creations through such

laws?

TO A COMMON PROSTITUTE

Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal

and lusty as Nature,

Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,

Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to

rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle

for you.

 

My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that

you make preparation to be worthy to meet me,

And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

 

Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.

I WAS LOOKING A LONG WHILE

I was looking a long while for Intentions,

For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for these

chants—and now I have found it,

It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither

accept nor reject,)

It is no more in the legends than in all else,

It is in the present—it is this earth to-day,

It is in Democracy—(the purport and aim of all the past,)

It is the life of one man or one woman to-day—the average man

of to-day,

It is in languages, social customs, literatures, arts,

It is in the broad show of artificial things, ships, machinery,

politics, creeds, modern improvements, and the interchange

of nations,

All for the modern—all for the average man of to-day.

THOUGHT

Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth,

scholarships, and the like;

(To me all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from

them, except as it results to their bodies and souls,

So that often to me they appear gaunt and naked,

And often to me each one mocks the others, and mocks himself

or herself,

And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the

rotten excrement of maggots,

And often to me those men and women pass unwittingly the true

realities of life, and go toward false realities,

And often to me they are alive after what custom has served them,

but nothing more,

And often to me they are sad, hasty, unwaked sonnambules

walking the dusk.)

MIRACLES

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the

water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night

with any one I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer

forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet

and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

 

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the

ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

SPARKLES FROM THE WHEEL

Where the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day,

Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with

them.

 

 

By the curb toward the edge of the flagging,

A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife,

Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee,

With measur’d tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but

firm hand,

Forth issue then in copious golden jets,

Sparkles from the wheel.

 

The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,

The sad sharp-chinn’d old man with worn clothes and broad

shoulder-band of leather,

Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here

absorb’d and arrested,

The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,)

The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the

streets,

The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press’d blade,

Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,

Sparkles from the wheel.

TO A PUPIL

Is reform needed? is it through you?

The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you

need to accomplish it.

 

You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood,

complexion, clean and sweet?

Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and soul

that when you enter the crowd an atmosphere of desire and

command enters with you, and every one is impress’d with

your Personality?

 

O the magnet! the flesh over and over!

Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day

to inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,

elevatedness,

Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

UNFOLDED OUT OF THE FOLDS⁸¹

Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded,

and is always to come unfolded,

Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to come

the superbest man of the earth,

Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest

man,

Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be

form’d of perfect body,

Unfolded only out of the inimitable poems of woman can come

the poems of man, (only thence have my poems come;)

Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only

thence can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,

Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman I

love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man,

Unfolded out of the folds of the woman’s brain come all the folds

of the man’s brain, duly obedient,

Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded,

Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;

A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity, but

every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman;

First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in

himself.

WHAT AM I AFTER ALL

What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own

name? repeating it over and over;

I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.

 

To you your name also;

Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations

in the sound of your name?

KOSMOS

Who includes diversity and is Nature,

Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and

sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and

the equilibrium also,

Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing,

or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,

Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic

lover,

Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,

spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual,

Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good,

Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body

understands by subtle analogies all other theories,

The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these

States;

Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in

other globes with their suns and moons,

Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day

but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,

The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable

together.

OTHERS MAY PRAISE WHAT THEY LIKE

Others may praise what they like;

But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing in

art or aught else,

Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river, also the

western prairie-scent,

And exudes it all again.

WHO LEARNS MY LESSON COMPLETE?

Who learns my lesson complete?

Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist,

The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and offspring, merchant,

clerk, porter and customer,

Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy—draw nigh and

commence;

It is no lesson—it lets down the bars to a good lesson,

And that to another, and every one to another still.

 

The great laws take and effuse without argument,

I am of the same style, for I am their friend,

I love them quits and quits, I do not halt and make salaams.

 

I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and the reasons

of things,

They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.

I cannot say to any person what I hear—I cannot say it to

myself—it is very wonderful.

 

It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe moving so

exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt or the

untruth of a single second,

I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years,

nor ten billions of years,

Nor plann’d and built one thing after another as an architect

plans and builds a house.

 

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,

Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or

woman,

Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any

one else.

 

 

Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is

immortal;

I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and

how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally

wonderful,

And pass’d from a babe in the creeping trance of a couple of

summers and winters to articulate and walk—all this is

equally wonderful.

 

And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful.

 

And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as

wonderful,

And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them

to be true, is just as wonderful.

And that the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth, is

equally wonderful,

And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally

wonderful.

TESTS

All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable

to analysis in the soul,

Not traditions, not the outer authorities are the judges,

They are the judges of outer authorities and of all traditions,

They corroborate as they go only whatever corroborates

themselves, and touches themselves;

For all that, they have it forever in themselves to corroborate far

and near without one exception.

THE TORCH

On my Northwest coast in the midst of the night a fishermen’s

group stands watching,

Out on the lake that expands before them, others are spearing

salmon,

The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water,

Bearing a torch ablaze at the prow.

O STAR OF FRANCE (1870-71)⁸²

O star of France,

The brightness of thy hope and strength and fame,

Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long,

Beseems to-day a wreck driven by the gale, a mastless hulk,

And ‘mid its teeming madden’d half-drown’d crowds,

Nor helm nor helmsman.

 

 

Dim smitten star,

Orb not of France alone, pale symbol of my soul, its dearest

hopes,

The struggle and the daring, rage divine for liberty,

Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast’s dreams of

brotherhood,

Of terror to the tyrant and the priest.

Star crucified—by traitors sold,

Star panting o‘er a land of death, heroic land,

Strange, passionate, mocking, frivolous land.

 

Miserable! yet for thy errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke

thee,

Thy unexampled woes and pangs have quell’d them all,

And left thee sacred.

 

 

In that amid thy many faults thou ever aimedst highly,

In that thou wouldst not really sell thyself however great the

price,

In that thou surely wakedst weeping from thy drugg’d sleep,

In that alone among thy sisters thou, giantess, didst rend the ones

that shamed thee,

In that thou couldst not, wouldst not, wear the usual chains,

This cross, thy livid face, thy pierced hands and feet,

The spear thrust in thy side.

 

O star! O ship of France, beat back and baffled long!

Bear up 0 smitten orb! 0 ship continue on!

 

Sure as the ship of all, the Earth itself,

Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos,

Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons,

Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty,

Onward beneath the sun following its course,

So thee 0 ship of France!

 

Finish’d the days, the clouds dispel‘d,

The travail o’er, the long-sought extrication,

When lo! reborn, high o‘er the European world,

(In gladness answering thence, as face afar to face, reflecting ours

Columbia,)

Again thy star 0 France, fair lustrous star,

In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever,

Shall beam immortal.

THE OX-TAMER

In a far-away northern county in the placid pastoral region,

Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous

tamer of oxen,

There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to

break them,

He will take the wildest steer in the world and break him and

tame him,

He will go fearless without any whip where the young bullock

chafes up and down the yard,

The bullock’s head tosses restless high in the air with raging

eyes,

Yet see you! how soon his rage subsides—how soon this tamer

tames him;

See you! on the farms hereabout a hundred oxen young and old,

and he is the man who has tamed them,

They all know him, all are affectionate to him;

See you! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking;

Some are buff-color‘d, some mottled, one has a

white line running along his back, some are

brindled,

Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)—see you! the bright

hides,

See, the two with stars on their foreheads—see, the round bodies

and broad backs,

How straight and square they stand on their legs—what fine

sagacious eyes!

How they watch their tamer—they wish him near them—how

they turn to look after him!

What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves

away from them;

Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,

poems, depart—all else departs,)

I confess I envy only his fascination—my silent, illiterate friend,

Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,

In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.

AN OLD MAN’S THOUGHT OF SCHOOL

For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874

 

An old man’s thought of school,

An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth

itself cannot.

 

 

Now only do I know you,

O fair auroral skies—0 morning dew upon the grass!

 

And these I see, these sparkling eyes,

These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,

Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,

Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,

On the soul’s voyage.

 

Only a lot of boys and girls?

Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?

Only a public school?

Ah more, infinitely more;

(As George Fox rais’d his warning cry, “Is it this pile of brick and

mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the church?

Why this is not the church at all—the church is living, ever living

souls.”)

 

And you America,

Cast you the real reckoning for your present?

The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?

To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.

WANDERING AT MORN

Wandering at morn,

Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my

thoughts,

Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!

Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,

with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,

This common marvel I beheld—the parent thrush I watch’d

feeding its young,

The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,

Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

 

 

There ponder‘d, felt I,

If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be

turn’d,

If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,

Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;

Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?

From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,

Destin’d to fill the world.

ITALIAN MUSIC IN DAKOTA⁸³

[“The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.”]

 

Through the soft evening air enwinding all,

Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,

In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes,

Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,

(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,

Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,

Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera

house,

Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,

Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish,

And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)

Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,

Music, Italian music in Dakota.

 

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,

Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,

Acknowledging rapport however far remov‘d,

(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)

Listens well pleas’d.

WITH ALL THY GIFTS

With all thy gifts America,

Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,

Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee—with these and like of

these vouchsafed to thee,

What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem

never solving,)

The gift of perfect women fit for thee—what if that gift of gifts

thou lackest?

The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion,

fit for thee?

The mothers fit for thee?

MY PICTURE-GALLERY

In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house,

It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;

Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all

memories!

Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;

Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,

With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures.

THE PRAIRIE STATES

A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude,

Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,

With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,

By all the world contributed—freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s

society,

The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations,

To justify the past.

PROUD MUSIC OF THE STORM ⁸⁴

—1—

Proud music of the storm,

Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,

Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains,

Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras,

You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,

Blending with Nature’s rhythmus all the tongues of nations;

You chords left as by vast composers—you choruses,

You formless, free, religious dances—you from the Orient,

You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts,

You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry,

Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls,

Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me

powerless,

Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you

seiz’d me?

-2-

Come forward 0 my soul, and let the rest retire,

Listen, lose not, it is toward thee they tend,

Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber,

For thee they sing and dance 0 soul.

 

A festival song,

The duet of the bridegroom and the bride, a marriage-march,

With lips of love, and hearts of lovers fill’d to the brim with

love,

The red-flush’d cheeks and perfumes, the cortege swarming full

of friendly faces young and old,

To flutes’ clear notes and sounding harps’ cantabile.

Now loud approaching drums,

Victoria! see‘st thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying?

the rout of the baffled?

Hearest those shouts of a conquering army?

 

(Ah soul, the sobs of women, the wounded groaning in agony,

The hiss and crackle of flames, the blacken’d ruins, the embers of

cities,

The dirge and desolation of mankind.)

 

Now airs antique and mediaeval fill me,

I see and hear old harpers with their harps at Welsh festivals,

I hear the minnesingers singing their lays of love,

I hear the minstrels, gleemen, troubadours, of the middle ages.

 

Now the great organ sounds,

Tremulous, while underneath, (as the hid footholds of the earth,

On which arising rest, and leaping forth depend,

All shapes of beauty, grace and strength, all hues we know,

Green blades of grass and warbling birds, children that gambol

and play, the clouds of heaven above,)

The strong base stands, and its pulsations intermits not,

Bathing, supporting, merging all the rest, maternity of all the rest,

And with it every instrument in multitudes,

The players playing, all the world’s musicians,

The solemn hymns and masses rousing adoration,

All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals,

The measureless sweet vocalists of ages,

And for their solvent setting earth’s own diapason,

Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves,

A new composite orchestra, binder of years and climes, ten-fold

renewer,

As of the far-back days the poets tell, the Paradiso,

The straying thence, the separation long, but now the wandering

done,

The journey done, the journeyman come home,

And man and art with Nature fused again.

Tutti! for earth and heaven;

(The Almighty leader now for once has signal’d with his wand.)

The manly strophe of the husbands of the world,

And all the wives responding.

 

The tongues of violins,

(I think 0 tongues ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself,

This brooding yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.)

-3-

Ah from a little child,

Thou knowest soul how to me all sounds became music,

My mother’s voice in lullaby or hymn,

(The voice, 0 tender voices, memory’s loving voices,

Last miracle of all, 0 dearest mother‘s, sister’s, voices;)

The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav’d corn,

The measur’d sea-surf beating on the sand,

The twittering bird, the hawk’s sharp scream,

The wild-fowl’s notes at night as flying low migrating north or

south,

The psalm in the country church or mid the clustering trees, the

open air camp-meeting,

The fiddler in the tavern, the glee, the long-strung sailor-song,

The lowing cattle, bleating sheep, the crowing cock at dawn.

 

All songs of current lands come sounding round me,

The German airs of friendship, wine and love,

Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances, English warbles,

Chansons of France, Scotch tunes, and o‘er the rest,

Italia’s peerless compositions.

 

Across the stage with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion,

Stalks Norma brandishing the dagger in her hand.

 

I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’ unnatural gleam,

Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevel’d.

 

I see where Ernani walking the bridal garden,

Amid the scent of night-roses, radiant, holding his bride by the hand,

Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn.

To crossing swords and gray hairs bared to heaven,

The clear electric base and baritone of the world,

The trombone duo, Libertad forever!

 

From Spanish chestnut trees’ dense shade,

By old and heavy convent walls a wailing song,

Song of lost love, the torch of youth and life quench’d in despair,

Song of the dying swan, Fernando’s heart is breaking.

 

Awaking from her woes at last retriev’d Amina sings,

Copious as stars and glad as morning light the torrents of

her joy.

 

(The teeming lady comes,

The lustrious orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother,

Sister of loftiest gods, Alboni’s self I hear.)

—4—

I hear those odes, symphonies, operas,

I hear in the William Tell the music of an arous’d and angry

people,

I hear Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, the Prophet, or Robert,

Gounod’s Faust, or Mozart’s Don Juan.

 

I hear the dance-music of all nations,

The waltz, some delicious measure, lapsing, bathing me in bliss,

The bolero to tinkling guitars and clattering castanets.

I see religious dances old and new,

I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre,

I see the crusaders marching bearing the cross on high, to the

martial clang of cymbals,

I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers’d with frantic

shouts, as they spin around turning always towards Mecca,

I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs,

Again, at Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks

dancing,

I hear them clapping their hands as they bend their bodies,

I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet.

I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers

wounding each other,

I see the Roman youth to the shrill sound of flageolets throwing

and catching their weapons,

As they fall on their knees and rise again.

 

I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling,

I see the worshippers within, nor form nor sermon, argument nor

word,

But silent, strange, devout, rais‘d, glowing heads, ecstatic faces.

 

I hear the Egyptian harps of many strings,

The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen,

The sacred imperial hymns of China,

To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone,)

Or to Hindu flutes and the fretting twang of the vina,

A band of bayaderes.

—5—

Now Asia, Africa leave me, Europe seizing inflates me,

To organs huge and bands I hear as from vast concourses of voices,

Luther’s strong hymn Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott,

Rossini’s Stabat Mater dolorosa,

Or floating in some high cathedral dim with gorgeous color’d

windows,

The passionate Agnus Dei or Gloria in Excelsis.

 

Composers! mighty maestros!

And you, sweet singers of old lands, soprani, tenori, bassi!

To you a new bard caroling in the West,

Obeisant sends his love.

 

(Such led to thee 0 soul,

All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee,

But now it seems to me sound leads o‘er all the rest.)

I hear the annual singing of the children in St. Paul’s

cathedral,

Or, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the symphonies,

oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn,

The Creation in billows of godhood laves me.

 

Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)

Fill me with all the voices of the universe,

Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,

The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and

dances,

Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!

-6-

Then I woke softly,

And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,

And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,

And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,

And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,

And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,

And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,

I said to my silent curious soul out of the bed of the slumber-

chamber,

Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long,

Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,

Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,

Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.

 

And I said, moreover,

Haply what thou hast heard 0 soul was not the sound of winds,

Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings nor

harsh scream,

Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,

Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor

layers of harmonies,

Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching

soldiers,

Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-calls of camps,

But to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,

Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in

night air, uncaught, unwritten,

Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.

PASSAGE TO INDIA⁸⁵

—1—

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)

In the Old World the east the Suez canal,

The New by its mighty railroad spann‘d,

The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;

Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee 0 soul,

The Past! the Past! the Past!

 

The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect!

The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!

The past—the infinite greatness of the past!

For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

(As a projectile form‘d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still

keeps on,

So the present, utterly form‘d, impell’d by the past.)

-2-

Passage 0 soul to India!

Eclaircise^bq the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.

 

Not you alone proud truths of the world,

Nor you alone ye facts of modern science,

But myths and fables of eld, Asia‘s, Africa’s fables,

The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,

The deep diving bibles and legends,

The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;

O you temples fairer than lilies pour’d over by the rising sun!

0 you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known,

mounting to heaven!

You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d

with gold!

Towers of fables immortal fashion’d from mortal dreams!

You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest!

You too with joy I sing.

 

Passage to India!

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann‘d, connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

 

A worship new I sing,

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,

You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,

You, not for trade or transportation only,

But in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul.

—3—

Passage to India!

Lo soul for thee of tableaus twain,

I see in one the Suez canal initiated, open‘d,

I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading

the van,

I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level

sand in the distance,

I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d,

The gigantic dredging machines.

In one again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,)

I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting

every barrier,

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying

freight and passengers,

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-

whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the

world,

I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes,

the buttes,

I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless,

sage-deserts,

I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great

mountains, I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch

mountains,

I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest, I pass the

Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas,

I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,

I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,

I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines,

Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold

enchanting mirages of waters and meadows,

Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines,

Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,

Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,

The road between Europe and Asia.

 

(Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream!

Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,

The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.)

-4-

Passage to India!

Struggles of many a captain, tales of many a sailor dead,

Over my mood stealing and spreading they come,

Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach’d sky.

Along all history, down the slopes,

As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the surface

rising,

A ceaseless thought, a varied train—lo, soul, to thee, thy sight,

they rise,

The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions;

Again Vasco de Gama sails forth,

Again the knowledge gain‘d, the mariner’s compass,

Lands found and nations born, thou born America,

For purpose vast, man’s long probation fill’d,

Thou rondure of the world at last accomplish’d.

-5-

O vast Rondure, swimming in space,

Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty,

Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,

Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless

stars above,

Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,

With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,

Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.

 

Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,

Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,

Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,

With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy

hearts,

With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and

Whither 0 mocking life?

 

Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?

Who justify these restless explorations?

Who speak the secret of impassive earth?

Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?

What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a

throb to answer ours,

Cold earth, the place of graves.)

Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,

Perhaps even now the time has arrived.

 

After the seas are all cross‘d, (as they seem already cross’d,)

After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their

work,

After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the

geologist, ethnologist,

Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

 

Then not your deeds only 0 voyagers, O scientists and inventors,

shall be justified,

All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth‘d,

All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,

All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and

link’d together,

The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be

completely justified,

Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by

the true son of God, the poet,

(He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains,

He shall double the cape of Good Hope to some purpose,)

Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,

The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

-6-

Year at whose wide-flung door I sing!

Year of the purpose accomplish‘d!

Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans!

(No mere doge of Venice now wedding the Adriatic,)

I see 0 year in you the vast terraqueous globe given and

giving all,

Europe to Asia, Africa join’d, and they to the New World,

The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festival

garland,

As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand.

Passage to India!

Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man,

The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again.

 

Lo soul, the retrospect brought forward,

The old, most populous, wealthiest of earth’s lands,

The streams of the Indus and the Ganges and their many

affluents,

(I my shores of America walking to-day behold, resuming all,)

The tale of Alexander on his warlike marches suddenly dying,

On one side China and on the other side Persia and Arabia,

To the south the great seas and the bay of Bengal,

The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes,

Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and junior

Buddha,

Central and southern empires and all their belongings, possessors,

The wars of Tamerlane, the reign of Aurungzebe,

The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium,

the Arabs, Portuguese,

The first travelers famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor,

Doubts to be solv‘d, the map incognita, blanks to be fill’d,

The foot of man unstay‘d, the hands never at rest,

Thyself O soul that will not brook a challenge.

 

The mediaeval navigators rise before me,

The world of 1492, with its awaken’d enterprise,

Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the earth in

spring,

The sunset splendor of chivalry declining.

And who art thou sad shade?

Gigantic, visionary, thyself a visionary,

With majestic limbs and pious beaming eyes,

Spreading around with every look of thine a golden world,

Enhuing it with gorgeous hues.

 

As the chief histrion,

Down to the footlights walks in some great scena,

Dominating the rest I see the Admiral himself,

(History’s type of courage, action, faith,)

Behold him sail from Palos leading his little fleet,

His voyage behold, his return, his great fame,

His misfortunes, calumniators, behold him a prisoner, chain‘d,

Behold his dejection, poverty, death.

 

(Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,

Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?

Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s

due occasion,

Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,

And fills the earth with use and beauty.)

—7—

Passage indeed 0 soul to primal thought,

Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness,

The young maturity of brood and bloom,

To realms of budding bibles.

 

O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,

Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,

Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,

To reason’s early paradise,

Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,

Again with fair creation.

—8—

O we can wait no longer,

We too take ship 0 soul,

Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,

Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,

Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me,

O soul,)

Caroling free, singing our song of God,

Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.

With laugh and many a kiss,

(Let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse,

humiliation,)

O soul thou pleasest me, I thee.

 

Ah more than any priest 0 soul we too believe in God,

But with the mystery of God we dare not dally.

 

O soul thou pleasest me, I thee,

Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night,

Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like

waters flowing,

Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite,

Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over,

Bathe me 0 God in thee, mounting to thee,

I and my soul to range in range of thee.

 

0 Thou transcendent,

Nameless, the fibre and the breath,

Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,

Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,

Thou moral, spiritual fountain—affection’s source—thou

reservoir,

(0 pensive soul of me—0 thirst unsatisfied—waitest not there?

Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?)

Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,

That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,

Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,

How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if,

out of myself,

I could not launch, to those, superior universes?

 

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,

At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,

But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,

And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,

Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,

And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.

Greater than stars or suns,

Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;

What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?

What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours O soul?

What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?

What cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all?

For others’ sake to suffer all?

 

 

Reckoning ahead O soul when thou, the time achiev‘d,

The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain‘d,

As fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

9

Passage to more than India!

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?

O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?

Disportest thou on waters such as those?

Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?

Then have thy bent unleash’d.

 

Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!

Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!

You, strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never

reach’d you.

 

Passage to more than India!

O secret of the earth and sky!

Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!

Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!

Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!

O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!

O day and night, passage to you!

 

O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!

Passage to you!

Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!

Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?

Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like

mere brutes?

Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long

enough?

 

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

 

O my brave soul!

O farther farther sail!

O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

0 farther, farther, farther sail!

PRAYER OF COLUMBUS⁸⁶

A batter‘d, wreck’d old man,

Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,

Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,

Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken’d and nigh to death,

I take my way along the island’s edge,

Venting a heavy heart.

 

I am too full of woe!

Haply I may not live another day;

I cannot rest O God, I cannot eat or drink or sleep,

Till I put forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee,

Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee, commune with Thee,

Report myself once more to Thee.

 

Thou knowest my years entire, my life,

My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely;

Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth,

Thou knowest my manhood’s solemn and visionary meditations,

Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all to come to

Thee,

Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and strictly

kept them,

Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee,

In shackles, prison‘d, in disgrace, repining not,

Accepting all from Thee, as duly come from Thee.

 

All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee,

My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,

Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee;

Intentions, purports, aspirations mine, leaving results to Thee.

 

O I am sure they really came from Thee,

The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,

The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,

A message from the Heavens whispering to me even in sleep,

These sped me on.

 

By me and these the work so far accomplish‘d,

By me earth’s elder cloy’d and stifled lands uncloy’d, unloos‘d,

By me the hemispheres rounded and tied, the unknown to the

known.

 

 

The end I know not, it is all in Thee,

Or small or great I know not—haply what broad fields, what

lands,

Haply the brutish measureless human undergrowth I know,

Transplanted there may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee,

Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping-

tools,

Haply the lifeless cross I know, Europe’s dead cross, may bud and

blossom there.

 

 

One effort more, my altar this bleak sand;

That Thou O God my life hast lighted,

With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,

Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,

Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages;

For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees,

Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee.

 

My terminus near,

The clouds already closing in upon me,

The voyage balk‘d, the course disputed, lost,

I yield my ships to Thee.

 

My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,

My brain feels rack‘d, bewilder’d,

Let the old timbers part, I will not part,

I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,

Thee, Thee at least I know.

 

Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or am I raving?

What do I know of life? what of myself?

I know not even my own work past or present,

Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,

Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,

Mocking, perplexing me.

 

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?

As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,

Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,

And on the distant waves sail countless ships,

And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

THE SLEEPERS⁸⁷

—1—

I wander all night in my vision,

Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and

stopping,

Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,

Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,

Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

 

How solemn they look there, stretch’d and still,

How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles.

 

The wretched features of ennuyés, the white features of

corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of

onanists,

The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-

door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from

gates, and the dying emerging from gates,

The night pervades them and infolds them.

 

The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm

on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of

the husband,

The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,

The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,

And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt.

 

The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,

The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps,

The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?

And the murder’d person, how does he sleep?

 

The female that loves unrequited sleeps,

And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,

The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,

And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.

 

I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and

the most restless,

I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them,

The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep.

 

Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear,

The earth recedes from me into the night,

I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is

beautiful.

 

I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers

each in turn,

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,

And I become the other dreamers.

 

I am a dance—play up there! the fit is whirling me fast!

 

I am the ever-laughing—it is new moon and twilight,

I see the hiding of douceurs, I see nimble ghosts whichever way I

look,

Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and where it

is neither ground nor sea.

 

Well do they do their jobs those journeymen divine,

Only from me can they hide nothing, and would not if they could,

I reckon I am their boss and they make me a pet besides,

And surround me and lead me and run ahead when I walk,

To lift their cunning covers to signify me with stretch’d arms, and

resume the way;

Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards! with mirth-shouting

music and wild-flapping pennants of joy!

 

I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician,

The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box,

He who has been famous and he who shall be famous after to-day,

The stammerer, the well-form’d person, the wasted or feeble

person.

 

I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly,

My truant lover has come, and it is dark.

 

Double yourself and receive me darkness,

Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him.

 

I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk.

He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,

He rises with me silently from the bed.

 

Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was sweaty and

panting,

I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.

 

My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,

I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are

journeying.

 

Be careful darkness! already what was it touch’d me?

I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,

I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.

—2—

I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid,

Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.

 

It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman‘s,

I sit low in a straw-bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson’s

stockings.

 

It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter

midnight,

I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

 

A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the

coffin,

It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is blank

here, for reasons.

 

(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be

happy,

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he

has enough.)

-3-

I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the

eddies of the sea,

His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with

courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,

I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,

I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-

foremost on the rocks.

 

What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?

Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime

of his middle age?

 

Steady and long he struggles,

He is baffled, bang‘d, bruis’d, he holds out while his strength

holds out,

The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him

away, they roll him, swing him, turn him,

His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is continually

bruis’d on rocks,

Swiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.

-4-

I turn but do not extricate myself,

Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet.

 

The beach is cut by the razory ice-wind, the wreck-guns sound,

The tempest lulls, the moon comes floundering through the

drifts.

 

I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as

she strikes, I hear the howls of dismay, they grow fainter and

fainter.

 

I cannot aid with my wringing fingers,

I can but rush to the surf and let it drench me and freeze upon me.

I search with the crowd, not one of the company is wash’d to us

alive,

In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in

a barn.

—5—

Now of the older war-days, the defeat at Brooklyn,

Washington stands inside the lines, he stands on the intrench’d

hills amid a crowd of officers,

His face is cold and damp, he cannot repress the weeping

drops,

He lifts the glass perpetually to his eyes, the color is blanch’d

from his cheeks,

He sees the slaughter of the southern braves confided to him by

their parents.

 

The same at last and at last when peace is declared,

He stands in the room of the old tavern, the well-belov’d soldiers

all pass through,

The officers speechless and slow draw near in their turns,

The chief encircles their necks with his arm and kisses them on

the cheek,

He kisses lightly the wet cheeks one after another, he shakes

hands and bids good-by to the army.

-6-

Now what my mother told me one day as we sat at dinner

together,

Of when she was a nearly grown girl living home with her parents

on the old homestead.

 

A red squaw came one breakfast-time to the old homestead,

On her back she carried a bundle of rushes for rush-bottoming

chairs,

Her hair, straight, shiny, coarse, black, profuse, half-envelop’d her

face,

Her step was free and elastic, and her voice sounded exquisitely as

she spoke.

 

My mother look’d in delight and amazement at the

stranger,

She look’d at the freshness of her tall-borne face and full and

pliant limbs,

The more she look’d upon her she loved her,

Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity,

She made her sit on a bench by the jamb of the fireplace, she

cook’d food for her,

She had no work to give her, but she gave her remembrance and

fondness.

 

The red squaw staid all the forenoon, and toward the middle of

the afternoon she went away,

O my mother was loth to have her go away,

All the week she thought of her, she watch’d for her many a

month,

She remember’d her many a winter and many a summer,

But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there

again.

—7—

A show of the summer softness—a contact of something

unseen—an amour of the light and air,

I am jealous and overwhelm’d with friendliness,

And will go gallivant with the light and air myself.

 

O love and summer, you are in the dreams and in me,

Autumn and winter are in the dreams, the farmer goes with his

thrift,

The droves and crops increase, the barns are well-fill’d.

 

Elements merge in the night, ships make tacks in the dreams,

The sailor sails, the exile returns home,

The fugitive returns unharm‘d, the immigrant is back beyond

months and years,

The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood

with the well-known neighbors and faces,

They warmly welcome him, he is barefoot again, he forgets he is

well off,

The Dutchman voyages home, and the Scotchman and

Welshman voyage home, and the native of the Mediterranean

voyages home,

To every port of England, France, Spain, enter well-fill’d ships,

The Swiss foots it toward his hills, the Prussian goes his way, the

Hungarian his way, and the Pole his way,

The Swede returns, and the Dane and Norwegian return.

 

The homeward bound and the outward bound,

The beautiful lost swimmer, the ennuyé, the onanist, the female

that loves unrequited, the money-maker,

The actor and actress, those through with their parts and those

waiting to commence,

The affectionate boy, the husband and wife, the voter, the

nominee that is chosen and the nominee that has fail‘d,

The great already known and the great any time after to-day,

The stammerer, the sick, the perfect-form’d, the homely,

The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and

sentenced him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience,

The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow, the red

squaw,

The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wrong‘d,

The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the

dark,

I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other,

The night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them.

 

I swear they are all beautiful,

Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is

beautiful,

The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

Peace is always beautiful,

The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.

 

The myth of heaven indicates the soul,

The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it

comes or it lags behind,

It comes from its embower’d garden and looks pleasantly on itself

and encloses the world,

Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, and perfect and

clean the womb cohering,

The head well-grown proportion’d and plumb, and the bowels

and joints proportion’d and plumb.

 

The soul is always beautiful,

The universe is duly in order, every thing is in its place,

What has arrived is in its place and what waits shall be in its

place,

The twisted skull waits, the watery or rotten blood waits,

The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the child

of the drunkard waits long, and the drunkard himself waits

long,

The sleepers that lived and died wait, the far advanced are to go

on in their turns, and the far behind are to come on in their

turns,

The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and

unite—they unite now.

—8—

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,

They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as

they lie unclothed,

The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and

American are hand in hand,

Learn’d and unlearn’d are hand in hand, and male and female

are hand in hand,

The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover, they

press close without lust, his lips press her neck,

The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with

measureless love, and the son holds the father in his arms

with measureless love,

The white hair of the mother shines on the white wrist of the

daughter,

The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man, friend is

inarm’d by friend,

The scholar kisses the teacher and the teacher kisses the scholar,

the wrong’d is made right,

The call of the slave is one with the master’s call, and the master

salutes the slave,

The felon steps forth from the prison, the insane becomes sane,

the suffering of sick persons is reliev‘d,

The sweatings and fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is

sound, the lungs of the consumptive are resumed, the poor

distress’d head is free,

The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and

smoother than ever,

Stiflings and passages open, the paralyzed become supple,

The swell’d and convuls’d and congested awake to themselves in

condition,

They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the

night, and awake.

 

I too pass from the night,

I stay a while away O night, but I return to you again and

love you.

 

Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?

I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you,

I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay

so long,

I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with

you, but I know I came well and shall go well.

 

I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes,

I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return

to you.

TRANSPOSITIONS

Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever

bawling—let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the

stands;

Let judges and criminals be transposed—let the prison-keepers be

put in prison—let those that were prisoners take the keys;

Let them that distrust birth and death lead the rest.

TO THINK OF TIM_E⁸⁸

—1—

To think of time—of all that retrospection,

To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward.

 

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?

Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?

Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?

 

Is to-day nothing? is the beginningless past nothing?

If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.

To think that the sun rose in the east—that men and women were

flexible, real, alive—that every thing was alive,

To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear

our part,

To think that we are now here and bear our part.

—2—

Not a day passes, not a minute or second without an

accouchement,

Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse.

The dull nights go over and the dull days also,

The soreness of lying so much in bed goes over,

The physician after long putting off gives the silent and terrible

look for an answer,

The children come hurried and weeping, and the brothers and

sisters are sent for,

Medicines stand unused on the shelf, (the camphor-smell has

long pervaded the rooms,)

The faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the

dying,

The twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,

The breath ceases and the pulse of the heart ceases,

The corpse stretches on the bed and the living look upon it,

It is palpable as the living are palpable.

 

The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,

But without eyesight lingers a different living and looks curiously

on the corpse.

-3-

To think the thought of death merged in the thought of

materials,

To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others

taking great interest in them, and we taking no interest in

them.

 

To think how eager we are in building our houses,

To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent.

 

(I see one building the house that serves him a few years, or

seventy or eighty years at most,

I see one building the house that serves him longer than

that.)

 

Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they

never cease—they are the burial lines,

He that was President was buried, and he that is now President

shall surely be buried.

-4-

A reminiscence of the vulgar fate,

A frequent sample of the life and death of workmen,

Each after his kind.

 

Cold dash of waves at the ferry-wharf, posh and ice in the river,

half-frozen mud in the streets,

A gray discouraged sky overhead, the short last daylight of

December,

A hearse and stages, the funeral of an old Broadway stage-driver,

the cortege mostly drivers.

 

Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell,

The gate is pass‘d, the new-dug grave is halted at, the living alight,

the hearse uncloses,

The coffin is pass’d out, lower’d and settled, the whip is laid on

the coffin, the earth is swiftly shovel’d in,

The mound above is flatted with the spades—silence,

A minute—no one moves or speaks—it is done,

He is decently put away—is there any thing more?

 

He was a good fellow, free-mouth‘d, quick-temper’d, not bad

looking,

Ready with life or death for a friend, fond of women, gambled,

ate hearty, drank hearty,

Had known what it was to be flush, grew low-spirited toward the

last, sicken‘d, was help’d by a contribution,

Died, aged forty-one years—and that was his funeral.

 

Thumb extended, finger uplifted, apron, cape, gloves, strap, wet

weather clothes, whip carefully chosen,

Boss, spotter, starter, hostler, somebody loafing on you, you

loafing on somebody, headway, man before and man

behind,

Good day’s work, bad day’s work, pet stock, mean stock, first out,

last out, turning-in at night,

To think that these are so much and so nigh to other drivers, and

he there takes no interest in them.

—5—

The markets, the government, the working-man’s wages, to think

what account they are through our nights and days,

To think that other working-men will make just as great account

of them, yet we make little or no account.

 

The vulgar and the refined, what you call sin and what you call

goodness, to think how wide a difference,

To think the difference will still continue to others, yet we lie

beyond the difference.

 

To think how much pleasure there is,

Do you enjoy yourself in the city? or engaged in business? or

planning a nomination and election? or with your wife and

family?

Or with your mother and sisters? or in womanly housework? or

the beautiful maternal cares?

These also flow onward to others, you and I flow onward,

But in due time you and I shall take less interest in them.

 

Your farm, profits, crops—to think how engross’d you are,

To think there will still be farms, profits, crops, yet for you of what

avail?

-6-

What will be will be well, for what is is well,

To take interest is well, and not to take interest shall be well.

 

The domestic joys, the daily housework or business, the building

of houses are not phantasms, they have weight, form, location,

Farms, profits, crops, markets, wages, government, are none of

them phantasms,

The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion,

The earth is not an echo, man and his life and all the things of

his life are well-consider’d.

 

 

You are not thrown to the winds, you gather certainly and safely

around yourself,

Yourself! yourself! yourself, for ever and ever!

—7—

It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and

father, it is to identify you,

It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be

decided,

Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form’d in

you,

You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

 

The threads that were spun are gather‘d, the weft crosses the warp, the pattern is systematic.

 

The preparations have every one been justified,

The orchestra have sufficiently tuned their instruments, the baton

has given the signal.

 

The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now

housed,

He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those

that to look upon and be with is enough.

 

The law of the past cannot be eluded,

The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,

The law of the living cannot be eluded, it is eternal,

The law of promotion and transformation cannot be eluded,

The law of heroes and good-doers cannot be eluded,

The law of drunkards, informers, mean persons, not one iota

thereof can be eluded.

—8—

Slow moving and black lines go ceaselessly over the earth,

Northerner goes carried and Southerner goes carried, and they on

the Atlantic side and they on the Pacific,

And they between, and all through the Mississippi country, and

all over the earth.

 

The great masters and kosmos are well as they go, the heroes and

good-doers are well,

The known leaders and inventors and the rich owners and pious

and distinguish’d may be well,

But there is more account than that, there is strict account

of all.

 

The interminable hordes of the ignorant and wicked are not

nothing,

The barbarians of Africa and Asia are not nothing,

The perpetual successions of shallow people are not nothing as

they go.

 

Of and in all these things,

I have dream’d that we are not to be changed so much, nor the

law of us changed,

I have dream’d that heroes and good-doers shall be under the

present and past law,

And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the present

and past law,

For I have dream’d that the law they are under now is enough.

 

And I have dream’d that the purpose and essence of the known

life, the transient,

Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the permanent.

 

If all came but to ashes of dung,

If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! for we are betray‘d,

Then indeed suspicion of death.

Do you suspect death? if I were to suspect death I should die now,

Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward

annihilation?

 

 

Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,

Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,

The whole universe indicates that it is good,

The past and the present indicate that it is good.

 

How beautiful and perfect are the animals!

How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!

What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as

perfect,

The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the

imponderable fluids perfect;

Slowly and surely they have pass’d on to this, and slowly and

surely they yet pass on.

-9-

I swear I think now that every thing without exception has an

eternal soul!

The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have!

the animals!

 

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!

That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it,

and the cohering is for it!

And all preparation is for it—and identity is for it—and life and

materials are altogether for it!