Leaves of Grass: First and Death-Bed Editions
Page 53
to me.
Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice,
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states
and men.
-5-
Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected
materials,
America brings builders, and brings its own styles.
The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and
pass’d to other spheres,
A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.
America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at
all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
of precedents,
Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced
under their forms,
Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne
from the house,
Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was fittest
for its days,
That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir
who approaches,
And that he shall be fittest for his days.
Any period one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.
These States are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of
the day and night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul
loves,
Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the
soul loves.
-6-
Land of lands and bards to corroborate!
Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred
face,
To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d both mother’s and
father‘s,
His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,
Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with
incomparable love,
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in
him,
Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,
Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,
If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he
stretching with them North or South,
Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is
between them,
Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar,
hemlock, live oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood,
orange, magnolia,
Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,
He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with
northern transparent ice,
Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the fish
hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,
His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit, unclosed to good and
evil,
Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present
times,
Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,
Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and
muscle,
The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation
of the Constitution,
The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,
The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and
impregnable,
The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,
hunters, trappers,
Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the
gestation of new States,
Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly
coming up from the uttermost parts,
Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers,
especially the young men,
Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait
they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in
the presence of superiors,
The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness
and decision of their phrenology,
The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when
wrong’d,
The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,
good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,
The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,
The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid
movement of the population,
The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-
digging,
Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all
points,
Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,
Northwest, Southwest,
Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon
the ruins of all the rest,
On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours
be the stake, and respite no more.
-7-
(Lo, high toward heaven, this day,
Libertad, from the conqueress’ field return‘d,
I mark the new aureola around your head,
No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,
With war’s flames and the lambent lightnings playing,
And your port immovable where you stand,
With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch’d and lifted
fist,
And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner
utterly crush’d beneath you,
The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his
senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,
The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so
much,
To-day a carrion dead and damn’d, the despised of all the earth,
An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn’d.)
-8-
Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever
keeps vista,
Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,
O days of the future I believe in you—I isolate myself for your sake,
O America because you build for mankind I build for you,
O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision
and science,
Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.
(Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!
But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain,
pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)
-9-
I listened to the Phantom by Ontario’s shore,
I heard the voice arising demanding bards,
By them all native a
nd grand, by them alone can these States be
fused into the compact organism of a Nation.
To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no
account,
That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living
principle, as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of
plants.
Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff
most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them
the greatest,
Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as
their poets shall.
(Soul of love and tongue of fire!
Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world!
Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren,
barren?)
-10-
Of these States the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail
of their full returns,
Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither
more nor less,
He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
He is the equalizer of his age and land,
He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants
checking,
In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty,
building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,
commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,
immortality, government,
In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as good
as the engineer‘s, he can make every word he speaks draw
blood,
The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady
faith,
He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him
absolutely,)
He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a
helpless thing,
As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and
denouement,
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and
women as dreams or dots.
For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,
For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.
Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,
They live in the feelings of young men and the best women,
(Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been
always ready to fall for Liberty.)
-11-
For the great Idea,
That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.
Songs of stern defiance ever ready,
Songs of the rapid arming and the march,
The flag of peace quick-folded, and instead the flag we know,
Warlike flag of the great Idea.
(Angry cloth I saw there leaping!
I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,
I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight—O the
hard-contested fight!
The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles—the hurtled balls
scream,
The battle-front forms amid the smoke—the volleys pour
incessant from the line,
Hark, the ringing word Charge!—now the tussle and the furious
maddening yells,
Now the corpses tumble curl’d upon the ground,
Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,
Angry cloth I saw there leaping.)
-12-
Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here
in the States?
The place is august, the terms obdurate.
Who would assume to teach here may well prepare himself body
and mind,
He may well survey, ponder, arm, fortify, harden, make lithe
himself,
He shall surely be question’d beforehand by me with many and
stern questions.
Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,
pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and
objects?
Have you consider’d the organic compact of the first day of the
first year of Independence, sign’d by the Commissioners,
ratified by the States, and read by Washington at the head
of the army?
Have you possess’d yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind
them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?
Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea, the
bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers,
teach?
Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?
Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,
fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the
whole People?
Are you not of some coterie? some school or mere religion?
Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now
to life itself?
Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?
Have you too the old ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?
Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the
last born? little and big? and for the errant?
What is this you bring my America?
Is it uniform with my country?
Is it not something that has been better told or done before?
Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?—is the good old
cause in it?
Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
literats, of enemies’ lands?
Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union
in that secession war?
Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
strength, gait, face?
Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not
mere amanuenses?
Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face?
What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities?
Chicago, Kanada, Arkansas?
Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians
standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese,
Western men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy,
and in the promptness of their love?
Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen,
each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist, infidel,
who has ever ask’d any thing of America?
What mocking and scornful negligence?
The track strew’d with the dust of skeletons,
By the roadside others disdainfully toss’d.
-13-
Rhyme
s and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass
away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of
literature,
America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it or
conceal from it, it is impassive enough,
Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there
is no fear of mistake,
(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country
absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it.)
He masters whose spirit masters, he tastes sweetest who results
sweetest in the long run,
The blood of the brawn beloved of time is unconstraint;
In the need of songs, philosophy, an appropriate native grand-
opera, shipcraft, any craft,
He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original
practical example.
Already a nonchalant breed, silently emerging, appears on the
streets,
People’s lips salute only doers, lovers, satisfiers, positive knowers,
There will shortly be no more priests, I say their work is done,
Death is without emergencies here, but life is perpetual
emergencies here,
Are your body, days, manners, superb? after death you shall be
superb,
Justice, health, self-esteem, clear the way with irresistible
power;
How dare you place any thing before a man?
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Fall behind me States!
A man before all—myself, typical, before all.
Give me the pay I have served for,
Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest,
I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches,
I have given alms to every one that ask‘d, stood up for the stupid
and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others,
Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and
indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing
known or unknown,
Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the
young, and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees,
stars, rivers,