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Leaves of Grass: First and Death-Bed Editions

Page 39

by Walt Whitman


  O to sail to sea in a ship!

  To leave this steady unendurable land,

  To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and

  the houses,

  To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,

  To sail and sail and sail!

  O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!

  To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!

  To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,

  A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)

  A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

  SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE

  —1—

  Weapon shapely, naked, wan,37

  Head from the mother’s bowels drawn,

  Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,

  Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little

  seed sown,

  Resting the grass amid and upon,

  To be lean’d and to lean on.

  Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades,

  sights and sounds,

  Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music,

  Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great

  organ.

  —2—

  Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind,

  Welcome are lands of pine and oak,

  Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,

  Welcome are lands of gold,

  Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the

  grape,

  Welcome are lands of sugar and rice,

  Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato

  and sweet potato,

  Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies,

  Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings,

  Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming

  soil of orchards, flax, honey, hemp;

  Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,

  Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,

  Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores,

  Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc,

  Lands of iron—lands of the make of the axe.

  —3—

  The log at the wood-pile, the axe supported by it,

  The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space clear’d for a

  garden,

  The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is

  lull‘d,

  The wailing and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,

  The thought of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam

  ends, and the cutting away of masts,

  The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion’d houses and

  barns,

  The remember’d print or narrative, the voyage at a venture of

  men, families, goods,

  The disembarkation, the founding of a new city,

  The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it, the

  outset anywhere,

  The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa, Willamette,

  The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddlebags;

  The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons,

  The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men with their clear

  untrimm’d faces,

  The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on

  themselves,

  The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the

  boundless impatience of restraint,

  The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types,

  the solidification;

  The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard schooners

  and sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,

  Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods,

  stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional

  snapping,

  The glad clear sound of one’s own voice, the merry song, the

  natural life of the woods, the strong day’s work,

  The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the

  bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-skin;

  The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,

  The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,

  The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying

  them regular,

  Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they

  were prepared,

  The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men,

  their cury’d limbs,

  Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on

  by posts and braces,

  The hook’d arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,

  The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail’d,

  Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,

  The echoes resounding through the vacant building;

  The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,

  The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end,

  carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-

  beam,

  The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands rapidly

  laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear,

  The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the

  trowels striking the bricks,

  The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its

  place, and set with a knock of the trowel-handle,

  The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the

  steady replenishing by the hod-men;

  Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown

  apprentices,

  The swing of their axes on the square-hew’d log shaping it toward

  the shape of a mast,

  The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,

  The butter-color’d chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,

  The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy

  costumes,

  The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats, stays

  against the sea;

  The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the close-

  pack’d square,

  The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and

  daring,

  The strong command through the fire trumpets, the falling in

  line, the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,

  The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets, the bringing to bear of the

  hooks and ladders and their execution,

  The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through

  floors if the fire smoulders under them,

  The crowd with their lit faces watching, the glare and dense

  shadows;

  The forger at his forge-furnace and the user of iron after him,

  The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and

  temperer,

  The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel and trying the

  edge with his thumb,

  The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in the

  socket;

  The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,

  The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,

  The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizraat edifice,

  The Roman lictorsau preceding the consuls,

  The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,

  The uplifted arm, the clatter of
blows on the helmeted head,

  The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and

  foe thither,

  The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,

  The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce

  and parley,

  The sack of an old city in its time,

  The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and

  disorderly,

  Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,

  Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women

  in the gripe of brigands,

  Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons

  despairing,

  The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,

  The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust,

  The power of personality just or unjust.

  -4-

  Muscle and pluck forever!

  What invigorates life invigorates death,

  And the dead advance as much as the living advance,

  And the future is no more uncertain than the present,

  For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as

  the delicatesse of the earth and of man,

  And nothing endures but personal qualities.

  What do you think endures?

  Do you think a great city endures?

  Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or

  the best built steamships?

  Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d‘œuvres of

  engineering, forts, armaments?

  Away! these are not to be cherish’d for themselves,

  They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for

  them,

  The show passes, all does well enough of course,

  All does very well till one flash of defiance.

  A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

  If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole

  world.

  —5—

  The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d

  wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,

  Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-

  lifters of the departing,

  Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling

  goods from the rest of the earth,

  Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place

  where money is plentiest,

  Nor the place of the most numerous population.

  Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and

  bards,

  Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in

  return and understands them,

  Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words

  and deeds,

  Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,

  Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,

  Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,

  Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending

  audacity of elected persons,

  Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle

  of death pours its sweeping and unript waves,

  Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of

  inside authority,

  Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President,

  Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay,

  Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to

  depend on themselves,

  Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

  Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,

  Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same

  as the men,

  Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same

  as the men;

  Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,

  Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

  Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,

  Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,

  There the great city stands.

  —6—

  How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!

  How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a

  man’s or woman’s look!

  All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears;

  A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the

  universe,

  When he or she appears materials are overaw‘d,

  The dispute on the soul stops,

  The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn’d back, or laid

  away.

  What is your money-making now? what can it do now?

  What is your respectability now?

  What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books,

  now?

  Where are your jibes of being now?

  Where are your cavils about the soul now?

  —7—

  A sterile landscape covers the ore, there is as good as the best for

  all the forbidding appearance,

  There is the mine, there are the miners,

  The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplish‘d, the

  hammers-men are at hand with their tongs and hammers,

  What always served and always serves is at hand.

  Than this nothing has better served, it has served all,

  Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and long ere

  the Greek,

  Served in building the buildings that last longer than any,

  Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient

  Hindustanee,

  Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi, served those whose

  relics remain in Central America,

  Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn pillars

  and the druids,

  Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the snow-cover’d

  hills of Scandinavia,

  Served those who time out of mind made on the granite

  walls rough sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean

  waves,

  Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths, served the pastoral

  tribes and nomads,

  Served the long distant Kelt, served the hardy pirates of the

  Baltic,

  Served before any of those the venerable and harmless men of

  Ethiopia,

  Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure and the

  making of those for war,

  Served all great works on land and all great works on the sea,

  For the mediæaval ages and before the mediaeval ages,

  Served not the living only then as now, but served the dead.

  —8—

  I see the European headsman,

  He stands mask‘d, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong

  naked arms,

  And leans on a ponderous axe.

  (Whom have you slaughter’d lately European headsman?

  Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?)

  I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs,

  I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,

  Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown’d ladies, impeach’d ministers,

  rejected kings,

  Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the rest.

  I see those who in any land have died for the good cause,

  The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run out,

  (Mind you O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never run out.)

  I see the blood wash’d entirely away fr
om the axe,

  Both blade and helve are clean,

  They spirt no more the blood of European nobles, they clasp no

  more the necks of queens.

  I see the headsman withdraw and become useless,

  I see the scaffold untrodden and mouldy, I see no longer any axe

  upon it,

  I see the mighty and friendly emblem of the power of my own

  race, the newest, largest race.

  -9-

  (America! I do not vaunt my love for you,

  I have what I have.)

  The axe leaps!

  The solid forest gives fluid utterances,

  They tumble forth, they rise and form,

  Hut, tent, landing, survey,

  Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade,

  Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, jamb, lath, panel, gable,

  Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house,

  library,

  Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, turret, porch,

  Hoe, rake, pitchfork, pencil, wagon, staff, saw, jack-plane, mallet,

  wedge, rounce,

  Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor,

  Work-box, chest, string’d instrument, boat, frame, and what not,

  Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States,

  Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans or for the poor

  or sick,

  Manhattan steamboats and clippers taking the measure of all seas.

  The shapes arise!

  Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users and all that

  neighbors them,

  Cutters down of wood and haulers of it to the Penobscot or

  Kennebec,

  Dwellers in cabins among the California mountains or by the

  little lakes or on the Columbia,

  Dwellers south on the banks of the Gila or Rio Grande friendly

  gatherings, the characters and fun,

  Dwellers along the St. Lawrence, or north in Kanada, or down by

  the Yellowstone, dwellers on coasts and off coasts,

  Seal-fishers, whalers, arctic seamen breaking passages through

  the ice.

  The shapes arise!

  Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets,

  Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads,

  Shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches,

  Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows, lake and canal craft, river

  craft,

 

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