With firm and regular step they wend--they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;
One generation playing its part, and passing on,
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,
With faces turned sideways or backward towards me, to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;
One generation playing its part, and passing on,
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,
With faces turned sideways or backward towards me, to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.
Whitman
What I experience or
pourtray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition.
You shall stand by my side, and look in the mirror with me.
The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by
their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of
that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the traits of
the brotherhood of writers, savans, musicians, inventors, and artists,
nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms. In the
need of poems, philosophy, politics, mechanism, science, behaviour, the
craft of art, an appropriate native grand opera, shipcraft or any craft, he
is greatest for ever and for ever who contributes the greatest original
practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere
worthy of itself, and makes one.
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are,--Come to us on equal
terms, only then can you understand us. We are no better than you; what we
enclose you enclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there
could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and
that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight
countervails another--and that men can be good or grand only of the
consciousness of their supremacy within them. What do you think is the
grandeur of storms and dismemberments, and the deadliest battles and
wrecks, and the wildest fury of the elements, and the power of the sea, and
the motion of nature, and of the throes of human desires, and dignity and
hate and love? It is that something in the soul which says,--Rage on, whirl
on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and
of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of
all terror and all pain.
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for
encouraging competitors: they shall be kosmos--without monopoly or
secrecy--glad to pass anything to any one--hungry for equals night and day.
They shall not be careful of riches and privilege,--they shall be riches
and privilege: they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The most
affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out
of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard shall delineate no
class of persons, nor one or two out of the strata of interests, nor love
most nor truth most, nor the soul most nor the body most; and not be for
the eastern states more than the western, or the northern states more than
the southern.
Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest
poet, but always his encouragement and support. The outset and remembrance
are there--there the arms that lifted him first and brace him best--there
he returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor and traveller, the
anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist,
mathematician, historian, and lexicographer, are not poets; but they are
the lawgivers of poets, and their construction underlies the structure of
every perfect poem. No matter what rises or is uttered, they send the seed
of the conception of it: of them and by them stand the visible proofs of
souls. If there shall be love and content between the father and the son,
and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the
father, there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable
science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.
Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation of
the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the
soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are
fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed--
they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and
supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it, departs
as a dream. What has ever happened, what happens, and whatever may or shall
happen, the vital laws enclose all: they are sufficient for any case and
for all cases--none to be hurried or retarded--any miracle of affairs or
persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme where every motion, and every
spear of grass, and the frames and spirits of men and women, and all that
concerns them, are unspeakably perfect miracles, all referring to all, and
each distinct and in its place. It is also not consistent with the reality
of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more
divine than men and women.
Men and women, and the earth and all upon it, are simply to be taken as
they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall
be unintermitted, and shall be done with perfect candour. Upon this basis
philosophy speculates, ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the
eternal tendencies of all toward happiness, never inconsistent with what is
clear to the senses and to the soul. For the eternal tendencies of all
toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. Whatever
comprehends less than that--whatever is less than the laws of light and of
astronomical motion--or less than the laws that follow the thief, the liar,
the glutton, and the drunkard, through this life, and doubtless afterward--
or less than vast stretches of time, or the slow formation of density, or
the patient upheaving of strata--is of no account. Whatever would put God
in a poem or system of philosophy as contending against some being or
influence is also of no account. Sanity and ensemble characterise the great
master:--spoilt in one principle, all is spoilt. The great master has
nothing to do with miracles. He sees health for himself in being one of the
mass--he sees the hiatus in singular eminence. To the perfect shape comes
common ground. To be under the general law is great, for that is to
correspond with it. The master knows that he is unspeakably great, and that
all are unspeakably great--that nothing, for instance, is greater than to
conceive children, and bring them up well--that to be is just as great as
to perceive or tell.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is
indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women
exist; but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than
from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages
are worthy the grand idea,--to them it is confided, and they must sustain
it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it. The
attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn
of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are
full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them a while,
and, though they neither speak nor advise, you shall learn the faithful
American lesson. Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is
quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from
the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp
show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or
any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises
nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no
discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent
advance and retreat--the enemy triumphs--the prison, the handcuffs, the
iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote, and lead-balls, do their
work--the cause is asleep--the strong throats are choked with their own
blood--the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass
each other . . . and is liberty gone out of that place? No, never. When
liberty goes, 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 the memories of the old
martyrs are faded utterly away--when the large names of patriots are
laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators--when the boys
are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and
traitors instead--when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and
laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people--
when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung with compassion at the
sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no
man master--and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves--
when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its
experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a
helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel
inferiority--when those in all parts of these states who could easier
realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]--when the swarms of
cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly
involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures
or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love
and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no--
when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary
than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his
head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart--and when servility by
town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale
or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly
after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape--or rather
when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any
part of the earth--then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged
from that part of the earth.
[Footnote 1: This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here
reproduced _verbatim_ from the American edition. ]
As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and
soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of
genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts
are showered over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile
light--also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many-
fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a
beauty: the multiplication-table its--old age its--the carpenter's trade
its--the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at
sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty--the American
circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the
commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the
kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and
stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from
its need, and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say,
shall not realise or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the
library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for
it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same
through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom
they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity and
maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American
states, strong and healthy and accomplished, shall receive no pleasure from
violations of natural models, and must not permit them. In paintings or
mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood, or in the illustrations of books
or newspapers, or in any comic or tragic prints, or in the patterns of
woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or to
put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to
put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts
honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or
contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially, it
is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work,
nothing _outre_ can be allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed that
conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the
nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to
the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without ornament.
Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous
children are conceived only in those communities where the models of
natural forms are public every day. Great genius and the people of these
states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are
properly told, there is no more need of romances.
The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and
by the justification of perfect personal candour. Then folks echo a new
cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains. How beautiful is
candour! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candour.
Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the
inner and outer world, and that there is no single exception, and that
never since our earth gathered itself in a mass has deceit or subterfuge or
prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a
shade--and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the
whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and
despised--and that the soul has never been once fooled and never can be
fooled--and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid
puff--and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor
upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any
part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid
wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes,
nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that
follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action
afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation
anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and
comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and
destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of
nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs--
these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of
the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has
been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself
to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a
lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these
economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher
notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight
attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life
are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond
the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few
clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned,
and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the
melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to
the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days
and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or
infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and
all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and
atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you
pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness
and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete,
and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the
great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface
and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears
the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the
reached kisses of the soul. Still the right explanation remains to be made
about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the
most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when
little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence
suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year
or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back
at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the
clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction
running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself--all else has
reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of
consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in
a day or a month, or 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 always as great and real as the direct. The
spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one
name of word or deed--not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers--
not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder--no serpentine poison of
those that seduce women--not the foolish yielding of women--not of the
attainment of gain by discreditable means--not any nastiness of appetite--
not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to
sons, or sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their
boys--not of greedy looks or malignant wishes--nor any of the wiles
practised by people upon themselves--ever is or ever can be stamped on the
programme, but it is duly realised and returned, and that returned in
further performances, and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity
or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason,
whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary--to
add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned,
white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration
down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or
female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure
profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through
the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is
well--if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same--if the
President or chief justice is wise, it is the same--if the young mechanic
or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. The interest will come round--all
will come round. All the best actions of war and peace--all help given to
relatives and strangers, and the poor and old and sorrowful, and young
children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons--all
furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves--all the self-denial
that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take 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 scoffed at by
their neighbours--all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of
mothers--all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded--all the
grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we
inherit--and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient
nations unknown to us by name or date or location--all that was ever
manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no--all that has at any time been
well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his
mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands--and all that is well thought
or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the
wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here--or that is
henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any
one--these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inured now, and will
inure always, to the identities from which they sprung or shall spring. Did
you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist--
no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist--no result exists now without
being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so
backward without the farthest mentionable spot coining a bit nearer the
beginning than any other spot. . . . Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The
prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the
soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its
ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has
no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead
or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present,
matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible
forgiveness or deputed atonement--knows that the young man who composedly
perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while
the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches
and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning--and
that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to
prefer long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives
the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does
leaping onward and waiting to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any
emergency whatever neither hurries nor avoids death.
The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he
does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides--
and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang
on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age
transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives
similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and
inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its
inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day,
and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the
passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the
representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful
children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his
development. . . . Still, the final test of poems or any character or work
remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges
performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through
them? Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction
of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in
science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and
behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have
the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing
detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved
long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him?
and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old
think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a
man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last
under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realise
and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring--
he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of
him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live
regions previously unattained. Thenceforward is no rest: they see the space
and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums.
The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns
one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and
chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall
launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself,
and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through
the ceaseless rings, and shall never be quiet again.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a
while--perhaps a generation or two,--dropping off by degrees. A superior
breed shall take their place--the gangs of kosmos and prophets _en masse_
shall take their place. A new order shall arise; and they shall be the
priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built
under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the
divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be
interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find
their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future.
They shall not deign to defend immortality, or God, or the perfection of
things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They
shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the
earth.
The English language befriends the grand American expression--it is brawny
enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who,
through all change of circumstance, was never without the idea of political
liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of
daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful
language of resistance--it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech
of the proud and melancholy races, and of all who aspire. It is the chosen
tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality,
friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage. It is the medium
that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.
No great literature, nor any like style of behaviour or oratory or social
intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions, or the
treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail, or detail of
the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation, or courts or police, or
tuition or architecture, or songs or amusements, or the costumes of young
men, can long elude the jealous and passionate instinct of American
standards. Whether or no the sign appears from the mouths of the people, it
throbs a live interrogation in every freeman's and freewoman's heart after
that which passes by, or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my
country? Are its disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the
ever-growing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well united, proud
beyond the old models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown
fresh out of the fields, or drawn from the sea, for use to me, to-day,
here? I know that what answers for me, an American, must answer for any
individual or nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this
answer? or is it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the
needs of the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of
pleasure overlaid by modern science and forms? Does this acknowledge
liberty with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at
nought, for life and death? Will it help breed one good-shaped man, and a
woman to be his perfect and independent mate? Does it improve manners? Is
it for the nursing of the young of the republic? Does it solve readily with
the sweet milk of the breasts of the mother of many children? Has it too
the old, ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality? Does it look with the
same love on the last-born and on those hardening toward stature, and on
the errant, and on those who disdain all strength of assault outside of
their own?
The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away. The coward
will surely pass away. The expectation of the vital and great can only be
satisfied by the demeanour of the vital and great. The swarms of the
polished, deprecating, and reflectors, and the polite, float off and leave
no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the
visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their
warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor,
the statesman, the erudite--they are not unappreciated--they fall in their
place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No
disguise can pass on it--no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none,
it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself
will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he
has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and
wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its
poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is
true, the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs
him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
[Script: Meantime, dear friend,
Farewell, Walt Whitman. ]
_CHANTS DEMOCRATIC. _
_STARTING FROM PAUMANOK. _
1.
Starting from fish-shape Paumanok,[1] where I was born,
Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
Dweller in Mannahatta,[2] city of ships, my city,--or on southern savannas;
Or a soldier camped, or carrying my knapsack and gun--or a miner in
California;
Or rude in my home in Dakotah's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the
spring;
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
Far from the clank of crowds, intervals passing, rapt and happy;
Aware of the fresh free giver, the flowing Missouri--aware of mighty
Niagara
Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains--the hirsute and strong-
breasted bull;
Of earths, rocks, fifth-month flowers, experienced--stars, rain, snow, my
amaze;
Having studied the mocking-bird's tones, and the mountain hawk's,
And heard at dusk the unrivalled one, the hermit thrush, from the
swamp-cedars,
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.
2.
Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
Yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches,
mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This, then, is life;
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How curious! how real!
Under foot the divine soil--over head the sun.
See, revolving, the globe;
The ancestor-continents, away, grouped together;
The present and future continents, north and south, with the isthmus
between.
See, vast trackless spaces;
As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill;
Countless masses debouch upon them;
They are now covered with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.
See, projected through time,
For me an audience interminable.
With firm and regular step they wend--they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;
One generation playing its part, and passing on,
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,
With faces turned sideways or backward towards me, to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.
3.
Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian;
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
For you a programme of chants.
Chants of the prairies;
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican Sea;
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota;
Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless, to vivify all.
4.
In the Year 80 of the States,[3]
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents
the same,
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
(Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten. )
I harbour, for good or bad--I permit to speak, at every hazard--
Nature now without check, with original energy.
5.
Take my leaves, America! take them South, and take them North!
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring;
Surround them, East and West! for they would surround you;
And you precedents! connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly
with you.
I conned old times;
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters:
Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me!
In the name of these States, shall I scorn the antique?
Why, these are the children of the antique, to justify it.
6.
Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted
hither:
I have perused it--own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it;)
Think nothing can ever be greater--nothing can ever deserve more than it
deserves;
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place, with my own day, here.
Here lands female and male;
Here the heirship and heiress-ship of the world--here the flame of
materials;
Here spirituality, the translatress, the openly-avowed,
The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms;
The satisfier, after due long-waiting, now advancing,
Yes, here comes my mistress, the Soul.
7.
The SOUL!
For ever and for ever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than
water ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most
spiritual poems;
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul, and of
immortality.
I will make a song for these States, that no one State may under any
circumstances be subjected to another State;
And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night
between all the States, and between any two of them;
And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with
menacing points,
And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces:
And a song make I, of the One formed out of all;
The fanged and glittering one whose head is over all;
Resolute, warlike one, including and over all;
However high the head of any else, that head is over all.
I will acknowledge contemporary lands;
I will trail the whole geography of the globe, and salute courteously every
city large and small;
And employments! I will put in my poems, that with you is heroism, upon
land and sea--And I will report all heroism from an American point
of view;
And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me--for I am determined
to tell you with courageous clear voice, to prove you illustrious.
I will sing the song of companionship;
I will show what alone must finally compact these;
I believe These are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it
in me;
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening
to consume me;
I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires;
I will give them complete abandonment;
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love;
For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?
8.
I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races;
I advance from the people _en masse_ in their own spirit;
Here is what sings unrestricted faith.
Omnes! Omnes! let others ignore what they may;
I make the poem of evil also--I commemorate that part also;
I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is--And I say there is
in fact no evil,
Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the land, or to
me, as anything else.
I too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a Religion--I too
go to the wars;
It may be I am destined to utter the loudest cries thereof, the winner's
pealing shouts;
Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above everything.
Each is not for its own sake;
I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the sky, are for religion's
sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough;
None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough;
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the
future is.
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their
religion;
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;
Nor character, nor life worthy the name, without religion;
Nor land, nor man or woman, without religion.
9.
What are you doing, young man?
Are you so earnest--so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
These ostensible realities, politics, points?
Your ambition or business, whatever it may be?
It is well--Against such I say not a word--I am their poet also;
But behold! such swiftly subside--burnt up for religion's sake;
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of
the earth,
Any more than such are to religion.
10.
What do you seek, so pensive and silent?
What do you need, Camerado?
Dear son! do you think it is love?
Listen, dear son--listen, America, daughter or son!
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess--and yet it
satisfies--it is great;
But there is something else very great--it makes the whole coincide;
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands, sweeps and
provides for all.
11.
Know you: to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,
The following chants, each for its kind, I sing.
My comrade!
For you, to share with me, two greatnesses--and a third one, rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy--and the greatness of Religion.
Melange mine own! the unseen and the seen;
Mysterious ocean where the streams empty;
Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me;
Living beings, identities, now doubtless near us in the air, that we know
not of;
Contact daily and hourly that will not release me;
These selecting--these, in hints, demanded of me.
Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me
Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,
Any more than I am held to the heavens, to the spiritual world,
And to the identities of the Gods, my lovers, faithful and true,
After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.
O such themes! Equalities!
O amazement of things! O divine average!
O warblings under the sun--ushered, as now, or at noon, or setting!
O strain, musical, flowing through ages--now reaching hither,
I take to your reckless and composite chords--I add to them, and cheerfully
pass them forward.
12.
As I have walked in Alabama my morning walk,
I have seen where the she-bird, the mocking-bird, sat on her nest in the
briars, hatching her brood.
I have seen the he-bird also;
I have paused to hear him, near at hand, inflating his throat, and joyfully
singing.
And while I paused, it came to me that what he really sang for was not
there only,
Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes;
But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
A charge transmitted, and gift occult, for those being born.
13.
Democracy!
Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing.
Ma femme!
For the brood beyond us and of us,
For those who belong here, and those to come,
I, exultant, to be ready for them, will now shake out carols stronger and
haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.
I will make the songs of passion, to give them their way,
And your songs, outlawed offenders--for I scan you with kindred eyes, and
carry you with me the same as any.
I will make the true poem of riches,--
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres, and goes forward, and
is not dropped by death.
I will effuse egotism, and show it underlying all--and I will be the bard
of personality;
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the
other;
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present--and can be
none in the future;
And I will show that, whatever happens to anybody, it may be turned to
beautiful results--and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful
than death;
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as
profound as any.
I will not make poems with reference to parts;
But I will make leaves, poems, poemets, songs, says, thoughts, with
reference to ensemble:
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all
days;
And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a poem, but has reference
to the soul;
Because, having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no
one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul.
14.
Was somebody asking to see the Soul?
See! your own shape and countenance--persons, substances, beasts, the
trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.
All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them:
How can the real body ever die, and be buried?
Of your real body, and any man's or woman's real body,
Item for item, it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and pass to
fitting spheres,
Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the moment of
death.
Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the meaning,
the main concern,
Any more than a man's substance and life, or a woman's substance and life,
return in the body and the soul,
Indifferently before death and after death.
Behold! the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern--and
includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are! how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it.
15.
Whoever you are! to you endless announcements.
Daughter of the lands, did you wait for your poet?
Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand?
Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,
Live words--words to the lands.
O the lands! interlinked, food-yielding lands!
Land of coal and iron! Land of gold! Lands of cotton, sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! Land of wool and hemp! Land of the apple and
grape!
Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! Land of those
sweet-aired interminable plateaus!
Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west
Colorado winds!
Land of the eastern Chesapeake! Land of the Delaware!
Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! Land of Vermont and
Connecticut!
Land of the ocean shores! Land of sierras and peaks!
Land of boatmen and sailors! Fishermen's land!
Inextricable lands! the clutched together! the passionate ones!
The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limbed!
The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the
inexperienced sisters!
Far-breathed land! Arctic-braced! Mexican-breezed! the diverse! the
compact!
The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!
O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any rate
include you all with perfect love!
I cannot be discharged from you--not from one, any sooner than another!
O Death! O! --for all that, I am yet of you unseen, this hour, with
irrepressible love,
Walking New England, a friend, a traveller,
Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples, on Paumanok's
sands,
Crossing the prairies--dwelling again in Chicago--dwelling in every town,
Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
Listening to the orators and the oratresses in public halls,
Of and through the States, as during life[4]--each man and woman my
neighbour,
The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,
The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me--and I yet with any of them;
Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river--yet in my house of adobie,
Yet returning eastward--yet in the Sea-Side State, or in Maryland,
Yet Canadian cheerily braving the winter--the snow and ice welcome to me,
or mounting the Northern Pacific, to Sitka, to Aliaska;
Yet a true son either of Maine, or of the Granite State,[5] or of the
Narragansett Bay State, or of the Empire State;[6]
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same--yet welcoming every new
brother;
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones, from the hour they unite with
the old ones;
Coming among the new ones myself, to be their companion and equal--coming
personally to you now;
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.
16.
With me, with firm holding--yet haste, haste on.
For your life, adhere to me;
Of all the men of the earth, I only can unloose you and toughen you;
I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself to
you--but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?
No dainty _dolce affettuoso_ I;
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe;
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.
17.
On my way a moment I pause;
Here for you! and here for America!
Still the Present I raise aloft--still the Future of the States I harbinge,
glad and sublime;
And for the Past, I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.
The red aborigines!
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and
animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names;
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta,
Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla;
Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and
the land with names.
18.
O expanding and swift! O henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;
A world primal again--vistas of glory, incessant and branching;
A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far, with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.
These my voice announcing--I will sleep no more, but arise;
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,
stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.
19.
See! steamers steaming through my poems!
See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;
See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the
maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;
See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how
they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;
See pastures and forests in my poems--See animals, wild and tame--See,
beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short
curly grass;
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with
iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce;
See the many-cylindered steam printing-press--See the electric telegraph,
stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan;
See, through Atlantica's depths, pulses American, Europe reaching--pulses
of Europe, duly returned;
See the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the
steam-whistle;
See ploughmen, ploughing farms--See miners, digging mines--See the
numberless factories;
See mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools--See, from among them,
superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working
dresses;
See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me, well-beloved,
close-held by day and night;
Hear the loud echoes of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.
20.
O Camerado close!
O you and me at last--and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph--and you shall also;
O hand in hand--O wholesome pleasure--O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste, firm holding--to haste, haste on, with me.
[Footnote 1: Paumanok is the native name of Long Island, State of New York.
It presents a fish-like shape on the map. ]
[Footnote 2: Mannahatta, or Manhattan, is (as many readers will know) New
York. ]
[Footnote 3: 1856. ]
[Footnote 4: The poet here contemplates himself as yet living spiritually
and in his poems after the death of the body, still a friend and brother to
all present and future American lands and persons. ]
[Footnote 5: New Hampshire. ]
[Footnote 6: New York State. ]
_AMERICAN FEUILLAGE. _
AMERICA always!
Always our own feuillage!
Always Florida's green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana!
Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!
Always California's golden hills and hollows--and the silver mountains of
New Mexico! Always soft-breathed Cuba!
Always the vast slope drained by the Southern Sea--inseparable with the
slopes drained by the Eastern and Western Seas!
The area the eighty-third year of these States[1]--the three and a half
millions of square miles;
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main--the
thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings--
Always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches;
Always the free range and diversity! Always the continent of Democracy!
Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travellers, Canada,
the snows;
Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing
the huge oval lakes;
Always the West, with strong native persons--the increasing density there--
the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
All sights, South, North, East--all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
All characters, movements, growths--a few noticed, myriads unnoticed.
Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering.
On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
wooding up:
Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the
Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware;
In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the
hills--or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink;
In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the
water, rocking silently;
In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labour done--they rest
standing--they are too tired;
Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play
around;
The hawk sailing where men have not yet sailed--the farthest polar sea,
ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes;
White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes.
On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight
together;
In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding--the howl of the wolf,
the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk;
In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake, in summer visible
through the clear waters, the great trout swimming;
In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black
buzzard floating slowly, high beyond the tree-tops,
Below, the red cedar, festooned with tylandria--the pines and cypresses,
growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat;
Rude boats descending the big Pedee--climbing plants, parasites, with
coloured flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly
waved by the wind;
The camp of Georgia waggoners, just after dark--the supper-fires, and the
cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
Thirty or forty great waggons--the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from
troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees--the
flames--also the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and
rising;
Southern fishermen fishing--the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's
coast--the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery--the large sweep-
seines--the windlasses on shore worked by horses--the clearing,
curing, and packing houses;
Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the incisions
in the trees--There are the turpentine works,
There are the negroes at work, in good health--the ground in all directions
is covered with pine straw.
--In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by
the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking;
In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully
welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse.
On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under
shelter of high banks,
Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle--others
sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking;
Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the
Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the
plenteous moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree.
pourtray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition.
You shall stand by my side, and look in the mirror with me.
The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by
their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of
that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the traits of
the brotherhood of writers, savans, musicians, inventors, and artists,
nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms. In the
need of poems, philosophy, politics, mechanism, science, behaviour, the
craft of art, an appropriate native grand opera, shipcraft or any craft, he
is greatest for ever and for ever who contributes the greatest original
practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere
worthy of itself, and makes one.
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are,--Come to us on equal
terms, only then can you understand us. We are no better than you; what we
enclose you enclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there
could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and
that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight
countervails another--and that men can be good or grand only of the
consciousness of their supremacy within them. What do you think is the
grandeur of storms and dismemberments, and the deadliest battles and
wrecks, and the wildest fury of the elements, and the power of the sea, and
the motion of nature, and of the throes of human desires, and dignity and
hate and love? It is that something in the soul which says,--Rage on, whirl
on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and
of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of
all terror and all pain.
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for
encouraging competitors: they shall be kosmos--without monopoly or
secrecy--glad to pass anything to any one--hungry for equals night and day.
They shall not be careful of riches and privilege,--they shall be riches
and privilege: they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The most
affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out
of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard shall delineate no
class of persons, nor one or two out of the strata of interests, nor love
most nor truth most, nor the soul most nor the body most; and not be for
the eastern states more than the western, or the northern states more than
the southern.
Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest
poet, but always his encouragement and support. The outset and remembrance
are there--there the arms that lifted him first and brace him best--there
he returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor and traveller, the
anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist,
mathematician, historian, and lexicographer, are not poets; but they are
the lawgivers of poets, and their construction underlies the structure of
every perfect poem. No matter what rises or is uttered, they send the seed
of the conception of it: of them and by them stand the visible proofs of
souls. If there shall be love and content between the father and the son,
and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the
father, there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable
science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.
Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation of
the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the
soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are
fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed--
they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and
supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it, departs
as a dream. What has ever happened, what happens, and whatever may or shall
happen, the vital laws enclose all: they are sufficient for any case and
for all cases--none to be hurried or retarded--any miracle of affairs or
persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme where every motion, and every
spear of grass, and the frames and spirits of men and women, and all that
concerns them, are unspeakably perfect miracles, all referring to all, and
each distinct and in its place. It is also not consistent with the reality
of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more
divine than men and women.
Men and women, and the earth and all upon it, are simply to be taken as
they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall
be unintermitted, and shall be done with perfect candour. Upon this basis
philosophy speculates, ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the
eternal tendencies of all toward happiness, never inconsistent with what is
clear to the senses and to the soul. For the eternal tendencies of all
toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. Whatever
comprehends less than that--whatever is less than the laws of light and of
astronomical motion--or less than the laws that follow the thief, the liar,
the glutton, and the drunkard, through this life, and doubtless afterward--
or less than vast stretches of time, or the slow formation of density, or
the patient upheaving of strata--is of no account. Whatever would put God
in a poem or system of philosophy as contending against some being or
influence is also of no account. Sanity and ensemble characterise the great
master:--spoilt in one principle, all is spoilt. The great master has
nothing to do with miracles. He sees health for himself in being one of the
mass--he sees the hiatus in singular eminence. To the perfect shape comes
common ground. To be under the general law is great, for that is to
correspond with it. The master knows that he is unspeakably great, and that
all are unspeakably great--that nothing, for instance, is greater than to
conceive children, and bring them up well--that to be is just as great as
to perceive or tell.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is
indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women
exist; but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than
from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages
are worthy the grand idea,--to them it is confided, and they must sustain
it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it. The
attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn
of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are
full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them a while,
and, though they neither speak nor advise, you shall learn the faithful
American lesson. Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is
quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from
the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp
show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or
any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises
nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no
discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent
advance and retreat--the enemy triumphs--the prison, the handcuffs, the
iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote, and lead-balls, do their
work--the cause is asleep--the strong throats are choked with their own
blood--the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass
each other . . . and is liberty gone out of that place? No, never. When
liberty goes, 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 the memories of the old
martyrs are faded utterly away--when the large names of patriots are
laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators--when the boys
are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and
traitors instead--when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and
laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people--
when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung with compassion at the
sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no
man master--and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves--
when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its
experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a
helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel
inferiority--when those in all parts of these states who could easier
realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]--when the swarms of
cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly
involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures
or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love
and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no--
when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary
than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his
head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart--and when servility by
town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale
or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly
after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape--or rather
when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any
part of the earth--then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged
from that part of the earth.
[Footnote 1: This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here
reproduced _verbatim_ from the American edition. ]
As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and
soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of
genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts
are showered over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile
light--also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many-
fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a
beauty: the multiplication-table its--old age its--the carpenter's trade
its--the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at
sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty--the American
circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the
commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the
kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and
stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from
its need, and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say,
shall not realise or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the
library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for
it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same
through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom
they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity and
maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American
states, strong and healthy and accomplished, shall receive no pleasure from
violations of natural models, and must not permit them. In paintings or
mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood, or in the illustrations of books
or newspapers, or in any comic or tragic prints, or in the patterns of
woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or to
put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to
put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts
honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or
contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially, it
is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work,
nothing _outre_ can be allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed that
conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the
nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to
the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without ornament.
Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous
children are conceived only in those communities where the models of
natural forms are public every day. Great genius and the people of these
states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are
properly told, there is no more need of romances.
The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and
by the justification of perfect personal candour. Then folks echo a new
cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains. How beautiful is
candour! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candour.
Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the
inner and outer world, and that there is no single exception, and that
never since our earth gathered itself in a mass has deceit or subterfuge or
prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a
shade--and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the
whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and
despised--and that the soul has never been once fooled and never can be
fooled--and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid
puff--and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor
upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any
part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid
wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes,
nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that
follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action
afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation
anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and
comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and
destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of
nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs--
these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of
the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has
been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself
to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a
lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these
economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher
notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight
attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life
are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond
the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few
clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned,
and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the
melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to
the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days
and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or
infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and
all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and
atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you
pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness
and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete,
and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the
great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface
and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears
the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the
reached kisses of the soul. Still the right explanation remains to be made
about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the
most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when
little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence
suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year
or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back
at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the
clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction
running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself--all else has
reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of
consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in
a day or a month, or 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 always as great and real as the direct. The
spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one
name of word or deed--not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers--
not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder--no serpentine poison of
those that seduce women--not the foolish yielding of women--not of the
attainment of gain by discreditable means--not any nastiness of appetite--
not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to
sons, or sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their
boys--not of greedy looks or malignant wishes--nor any of the wiles
practised by people upon themselves--ever is or ever can be stamped on the
programme, but it is duly realised and returned, and that returned in
further performances, and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity
or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason,
whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary--to
add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned,
white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration
down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or
female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure
profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through
the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is
well--if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same--if the
President or chief justice is wise, it is the same--if the young mechanic
or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. The interest will come round--all
will come round. All the best actions of war and peace--all help given to
relatives and strangers, and the poor and old and sorrowful, and young
children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons--all
furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves--all the self-denial
that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take 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 scoffed at by
their neighbours--all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of
mothers--all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded--all the
grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we
inherit--and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient
nations unknown to us by name or date or location--all that was ever
manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no--all that has at any time been
well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his
mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands--and all that is well thought
or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the
wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here--or that is
henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any
one--these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inured now, and will
inure always, to the identities from which they sprung or shall spring. Did
you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist--
no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist--no result exists now without
being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so
backward without the farthest mentionable spot coining a bit nearer the
beginning than any other spot. . . . Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The
prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the
soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its
ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has
no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead
or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present,
matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible
forgiveness or deputed atonement--knows that the young man who composedly
perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while
the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches
and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning--and
that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to
prefer long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives
the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does
leaping onward and waiting to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any
emergency whatever neither hurries nor avoids death.
The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he
does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides--
and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang
on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age
transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives
similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and
inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its
inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day,
and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the
passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the
representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful
children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his
development. . . . Still, the final test of poems or any character or work
remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges
performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through
them? Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction
of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in
science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and
behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have
the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing
detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved
long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him?
and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old
think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a
man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last
under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realise
and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring--
he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of
him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live
regions previously unattained. Thenceforward is no rest: they see the space
and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums.
The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns
one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and
chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall
launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself,
and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through
the ceaseless rings, and shall never be quiet again.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a
while--perhaps a generation or two,--dropping off by degrees. A superior
breed shall take their place--the gangs of kosmos and prophets _en masse_
shall take their place. A new order shall arise; and they shall be the
priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built
under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the
divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be
interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find
their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future.
They shall not deign to defend immortality, or God, or the perfection of
things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They
shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the
earth.
The English language befriends the grand American expression--it is brawny
enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who,
through all change of circumstance, was never without the idea of political
liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of
daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful
language of resistance--it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech
of the proud and melancholy races, and of all who aspire. It is the chosen
tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality,
friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage. It is the medium
that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.
No great literature, nor any like style of behaviour or oratory or social
intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions, or the
treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail, or detail of
the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation, or courts or police, or
tuition or architecture, or songs or amusements, or the costumes of young
men, can long elude the jealous and passionate instinct of American
standards. Whether or no the sign appears from the mouths of the people, it
throbs a live interrogation in every freeman's and freewoman's heart after
that which passes by, or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my
country? Are its disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the
ever-growing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well united, proud
beyond the old models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown
fresh out of the fields, or drawn from the sea, for use to me, to-day,
here? I know that what answers for me, an American, must answer for any
individual or nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this
answer? or is it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the
needs of the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of
pleasure overlaid by modern science and forms? Does this acknowledge
liberty with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at
nought, for life and death? Will it help breed one good-shaped man, and a
woman to be his perfect and independent mate? Does it improve manners? Is
it for the nursing of the young of the republic? Does it solve readily with
the sweet milk of the breasts of the mother of many children? Has it too
the old, ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality? Does it look with the
same love on the last-born and on those hardening toward stature, and on
the errant, and on those who disdain all strength of assault outside of
their own?
The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away. The coward
will surely pass away. The expectation of the vital and great can only be
satisfied by the demeanour of the vital and great. The swarms of the
polished, deprecating, and reflectors, and the polite, float off and leave
no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the
visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their
warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor,
the statesman, the erudite--they are not unappreciated--they fall in their
place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No
disguise can pass on it--no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none,
it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself
will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he
has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and
wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its
poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is
true, the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs
him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
[Script: Meantime, dear friend,
Farewell, Walt Whitman. ]
_CHANTS DEMOCRATIC. _
_STARTING FROM PAUMANOK. _
1.
Starting from fish-shape Paumanok,[1] where I was born,
Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
Dweller in Mannahatta,[2] city of ships, my city,--or on southern savannas;
Or a soldier camped, or carrying my knapsack and gun--or a miner in
California;
Or rude in my home in Dakotah's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the
spring;
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
Far from the clank of crowds, intervals passing, rapt and happy;
Aware of the fresh free giver, the flowing Missouri--aware of mighty
Niagara
Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains--the hirsute and strong-
breasted bull;
Of earths, rocks, fifth-month flowers, experienced--stars, rain, snow, my
amaze;
Having studied the mocking-bird's tones, and the mountain hawk's,
And heard at dusk the unrivalled one, the hermit thrush, from the
swamp-cedars,
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.
2.
Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
Yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches,
mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This, then, is life;
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How curious! how real!
Under foot the divine soil--over head the sun.
See, revolving, the globe;
The ancestor-continents, away, grouped together;
The present and future continents, north and south, with the isthmus
between.
See, vast trackless spaces;
As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill;
Countless masses debouch upon them;
They are now covered with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.
See, projected through time,
For me an audience interminable.
With firm and regular step they wend--they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;
One generation playing its part, and passing on,
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,
With faces turned sideways or backward towards me, to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.
3.
Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian;
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
For you a programme of chants.
Chants of the prairies;
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican Sea;
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota;
Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless, to vivify all.
4.
In the Year 80 of the States,[3]
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents
the same,
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
(Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten. )
I harbour, for good or bad--I permit to speak, at every hazard--
Nature now without check, with original energy.
5.
Take my leaves, America! take them South, and take them North!
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring;
Surround them, East and West! for they would surround you;
And you precedents! connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly
with you.
I conned old times;
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters:
Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me!
In the name of these States, shall I scorn the antique?
Why, these are the children of the antique, to justify it.
6.
Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted
hither:
I have perused it--own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it;)
Think nothing can ever be greater--nothing can ever deserve more than it
deserves;
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place, with my own day, here.
Here lands female and male;
Here the heirship and heiress-ship of the world--here the flame of
materials;
Here spirituality, the translatress, the openly-avowed,
The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms;
The satisfier, after due long-waiting, now advancing,
Yes, here comes my mistress, the Soul.
7.
The SOUL!
For ever and for ever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than
water ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most
spiritual poems;
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul, and of
immortality.
I will make a song for these States, that no one State may under any
circumstances be subjected to another State;
And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night
between all the States, and between any two of them;
And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with
menacing points,
And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces:
And a song make I, of the One formed out of all;
The fanged and glittering one whose head is over all;
Resolute, warlike one, including and over all;
However high the head of any else, that head is over all.
I will acknowledge contemporary lands;
I will trail the whole geography of the globe, and salute courteously every
city large and small;
And employments! I will put in my poems, that with you is heroism, upon
land and sea--And I will report all heroism from an American point
of view;
And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me--for I am determined
to tell you with courageous clear voice, to prove you illustrious.
I will sing the song of companionship;
I will show what alone must finally compact these;
I believe These are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it
in me;
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening
to consume me;
I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires;
I will give them complete abandonment;
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love;
For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?
8.
I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races;
I advance from the people _en masse_ in their own spirit;
Here is what sings unrestricted faith.
Omnes! Omnes! let others ignore what they may;
I make the poem of evil also--I commemorate that part also;
I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is--And I say there is
in fact no evil,
Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the land, or to
me, as anything else.
I too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a Religion--I too
go to the wars;
It may be I am destined to utter the loudest cries thereof, the winner's
pealing shouts;
Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above everything.
Each is not for its own sake;
I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the sky, are for religion's
sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough;
None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough;
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the
future is.
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their
religion;
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;
Nor character, nor life worthy the name, without religion;
Nor land, nor man or woman, without religion.
9.
What are you doing, young man?
Are you so earnest--so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
These ostensible realities, politics, points?
Your ambition or business, whatever it may be?
It is well--Against such I say not a word--I am their poet also;
But behold! such swiftly subside--burnt up for religion's sake;
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of
the earth,
Any more than such are to religion.
10.
What do you seek, so pensive and silent?
What do you need, Camerado?
Dear son! do you think it is love?
Listen, dear son--listen, America, daughter or son!
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess--and yet it
satisfies--it is great;
But there is something else very great--it makes the whole coincide;
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands, sweeps and
provides for all.
11.
Know you: to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,
The following chants, each for its kind, I sing.
My comrade!
For you, to share with me, two greatnesses--and a third one, rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy--and the greatness of Religion.
Melange mine own! the unseen and the seen;
Mysterious ocean where the streams empty;
Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me;
Living beings, identities, now doubtless near us in the air, that we know
not of;
Contact daily and hourly that will not release me;
These selecting--these, in hints, demanded of me.
Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me
Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,
Any more than I am held to the heavens, to the spiritual world,
And to the identities of the Gods, my lovers, faithful and true,
After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.
O such themes! Equalities!
O amazement of things! O divine average!
O warblings under the sun--ushered, as now, or at noon, or setting!
O strain, musical, flowing through ages--now reaching hither,
I take to your reckless and composite chords--I add to them, and cheerfully
pass them forward.
12.
As I have walked in Alabama my morning walk,
I have seen where the she-bird, the mocking-bird, sat on her nest in the
briars, hatching her brood.
I have seen the he-bird also;
I have paused to hear him, near at hand, inflating his throat, and joyfully
singing.
And while I paused, it came to me that what he really sang for was not
there only,
Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes;
But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
A charge transmitted, and gift occult, for those being born.
13.
Democracy!
Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing.
Ma femme!
For the brood beyond us and of us,
For those who belong here, and those to come,
I, exultant, to be ready for them, will now shake out carols stronger and
haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.
I will make the songs of passion, to give them their way,
And your songs, outlawed offenders--for I scan you with kindred eyes, and
carry you with me the same as any.
I will make the true poem of riches,--
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres, and goes forward, and
is not dropped by death.
I will effuse egotism, and show it underlying all--and I will be the bard
of personality;
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the
other;
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present--and can be
none in the future;
And I will show that, whatever happens to anybody, it may be turned to
beautiful results--and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful
than death;
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as
profound as any.
I will not make poems with reference to parts;
But I will make leaves, poems, poemets, songs, says, thoughts, with
reference to ensemble:
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all
days;
And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a poem, but has reference
to the soul;
Because, having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no
one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul.
14.
Was somebody asking to see the Soul?
See! your own shape and countenance--persons, substances, beasts, the
trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.
All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them:
How can the real body ever die, and be buried?
Of your real body, and any man's or woman's real body,
Item for item, it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and pass to
fitting spheres,
Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the moment of
death.
Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the meaning,
the main concern,
Any more than a man's substance and life, or a woman's substance and life,
return in the body and the soul,
Indifferently before death and after death.
Behold! the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern--and
includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are! how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it.
15.
Whoever you are! to you endless announcements.
Daughter of the lands, did you wait for your poet?
Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand?
Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,
Live words--words to the lands.
O the lands! interlinked, food-yielding lands!
Land of coal and iron! Land of gold! Lands of cotton, sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! Land of wool and hemp! Land of the apple and
grape!
Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! Land of those
sweet-aired interminable plateaus!
Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west
Colorado winds!
Land of the eastern Chesapeake! Land of the Delaware!
Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! Land of Vermont and
Connecticut!
Land of the ocean shores! Land of sierras and peaks!
Land of boatmen and sailors! Fishermen's land!
Inextricable lands! the clutched together! the passionate ones!
The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limbed!
The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the
inexperienced sisters!
Far-breathed land! Arctic-braced! Mexican-breezed! the diverse! the
compact!
The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!
O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any rate
include you all with perfect love!
I cannot be discharged from you--not from one, any sooner than another!
O Death! O! --for all that, I am yet of you unseen, this hour, with
irrepressible love,
Walking New England, a friend, a traveller,
Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples, on Paumanok's
sands,
Crossing the prairies--dwelling again in Chicago--dwelling in every town,
Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
Listening to the orators and the oratresses in public halls,
Of and through the States, as during life[4]--each man and woman my
neighbour,
The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,
The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me--and I yet with any of them;
Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river--yet in my house of adobie,
Yet returning eastward--yet in the Sea-Side State, or in Maryland,
Yet Canadian cheerily braving the winter--the snow and ice welcome to me,
or mounting the Northern Pacific, to Sitka, to Aliaska;
Yet a true son either of Maine, or of the Granite State,[5] or of the
Narragansett Bay State, or of the Empire State;[6]
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same--yet welcoming every new
brother;
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones, from the hour they unite with
the old ones;
Coming among the new ones myself, to be their companion and equal--coming
personally to you now;
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.
16.
With me, with firm holding--yet haste, haste on.
For your life, adhere to me;
Of all the men of the earth, I only can unloose you and toughen you;
I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself to
you--but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?
No dainty _dolce affettuoso_ I;
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe;
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.
17.
On my way a moment I pause;
Here for you! and here for America!
Still the Present I raise aloft--still the Future of the States I harbinge,
glad and sublime;
And for the Past, I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.
The red aborigines!
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and
animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names;
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta,
Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla;
Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and
the land with names.
18.
O expanding and swift! O henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;
A world primal again--vistas of glory, incessant and branching;
A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far, with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.
These my voice announcing--I will sleep no more, but arise;
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,
stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.
19.
See! steamers steaming through my poems!
See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;
See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the
maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;
See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how
they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;
See pastures and forests in my poems--See animals, wild and tame--See,
beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short
curly grass;
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with
iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce;
See the many-cylindered steam printing-press--See the electric telegraph,
stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan;
See, through Atlantica's depths, pulses American, Europe reaching--pulses
of Europe, duly returned;
See the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the
steam-whistle;
See ploughmen, ploughing farms--See miners, digging mines--See the
numberless factories;
See mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools--See, from among them,
superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working
dresses;
See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me, well-beloved,
close-held by day and night;
Hear the loud echoes of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.
20.
O Camerado close!
O you and me at last--and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph--and you shall also;
O hand in hand--O wholesome pleasure--O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste, firm holding--to haste, haste on, with me.
[Footnote 1: Paumanok is the native name of Long Island, State of New York.
It presents a fish-like shape on the map. ]
[Footnote 2: Mannahatta, or Manhattan, is (as many readers will know) New
York. ]
[Footnote 3: 1856. ]
[Footnote 4: The poet here contemplates himself as yet living spiritually
and in his poems after the death of the body, still a friend and brother to
all present and future American lands and persons. ]
[Footnote 5: New Hampshire. ]
[Footnote 6: New York State. ]
_AMERICAN FEUILLAGE. _
AMERICA always!
Always our own feuillage!
Always Florida's green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana!
Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!
Always California's golden hills and hollows--and the silver mountains of
New Mexico! Always soft-breathed Cuba!
Always the vast slope drained by the Southern Sea--inseparable with the
slopes drained by the Eastern and Western Seas!
The area the eighty-third year of these States[1]--the three and a half
millions of square miles;
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main--the
thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings--
Always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches;
Always the free range and diversity! Always the continent of Democracy!
Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travellers, Canada,
the snows;
Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing
the huge oval lakes;
Always the West, with strong native persons--the increasing density there--
the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
All sights, South, North, East--all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
All characters, movements, growths--a few noticed, myriads unnoticed.
Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering.
On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
wooding up:
Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the
Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware;
In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the
hills--or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink;
In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the
water, rocking silently;
In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labour done--they rest
standing--they are too tired;
Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play
around;
The hawk sailing where men have not yet sailed--the farthest polar sea,
ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes;
White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes.
On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight
together;
In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding--the howl of the wolf,
the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk;
In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake, in summer visible
through the clear waters, the great trout swimming;
In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black
buzzard floating slowly, high beyond the tree-tops,
Below, the red cedar, festooned with tylandria--the pines and cypresses,
growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat;
Rude boats descending the big Pedee--climbing plants, parasites, with
coloured flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly
waved by the wind;
The camp of Georgia waggoners, just after dark--the supper-fires, and the
cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
Thirty or forty great waggons--the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from
troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees--the
flames--also the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and
rising;
Southern fishermen fishing--the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's
coast--the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery--the large sweep-
seines--the windlasses on shore worked by horses--the clearing,
curing, and packing houses;
Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the incisions
in the trees--There are the turpentine works,
There are the negroes at work, in good health--the ground in all directions
is covered with pine straw.
--In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by
the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking;
In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully
welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse.
On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under
shelter of high banks,
Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle--others
sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking;
Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the
Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the
plenteous moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree.
