by Walt Whitman
bear lively there!
(Our joys of strife and derring-do to the last!)
Put on the old ship all her power to-day!
Crowd top-sail, top-gallant and royal studding-sails,
Out challenge and defiance—flags and flaunting pennants
added,
As we take to the open—take to the deepest, freest waters.
TO THE PENDING YEAR
Have I no weapon-word for thee—some message brief and fierce?
(Have I fought out and done indeed the battle?) Is there no shot
left,
For all thy affectations, lisps, scorns, manifold silliness?
Nor for myself—my own rebellious self in thee?
Down, down, proud gorge!—though choking thee;
Thy bearded throat and high-borne forehead to the gutter;
Crouch low thy neck to eleemosynary gifts.
SHAKSPERE-BACON’S CIPHER125
I doubt it not—then more, far more;
In each old song bequeath‘d—in every noble page or text,
(Different—something unreck’d before—some unsuspected
author,)
In every object, mountain, tree, and star—in every birth and
life,
As part of each—evolv’d from each—meaning, behind the ostent,
A mystic cipher waits infolded.
LONG, LONG HENCE
After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials,
Accumulations, rous’d love and joy and thought,
Hopes, wishes, aspirations, ponderings, victories, myriads of readers,
Coating, compassing, covering—after ages’ and ages’
encrustations,
Then only may these songs reach fruition.
BRAVO, PARIS EXPOSITION! 126
Add to your show, before you close it, France,
With all the rest, visible, concrete, temples, towers, goods,
machines and ores,
Our sentiment wafted from many million heart-throbs, ethereal
but solid,
(We grand-sons and great-grand-sons do not forget your grand-sires,)
From fifty Nations and nebulous Nations, compacted, sent
oversea to-day,
America’s applause, love, memories and good-will.
INTERPOLATION SOUNDS
[General Philip Sheridan was buried at the Cathedral, Washington, D.C., August, 1888, with all the pomp, music and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic service.]
Over and through the burial chant,
Organ and solemn service, sermon, bending priests,
To me come interpolation sounds not in the show—plainly to
me, crowding up the aisle and from the window,
Of sudden battle’s hurry and harsh noises—war’s grim game to
sight and ear in earnest;
The scout call’d up and forward—the general mounted and his
aides around him—the new-brought word—the
instantaneous order issued;
The rifle crack—the cannon thud—the rushing forth of men
from their tents;
The clank of cavalry—the strange celerity of forming ranks—the
slender bugle note;
The sound of horses’ hoofs departing—saddles, arms,
accoutrements.bx
TO THE SUN-SET BREEZE
Ah, whispering, something again, unseen,
Where late this heated day thou enterest at my window, door,
Thou, laving, tempering all, cool-freshing, gently vitalizing
Me, old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat;
Thou, nestling, folding close and firm yet soft, companion better
than talk, book, art,
(Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond
the rest—and this is of them,)
So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within—thy soothing
fingers on my face and hands,
Thou, messenger-magical strange bringer to body and spirit of
me,
(Distances balk‘d—occult medicines penetrating me from head to
foot,)
I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes,
I feel the ocean and the forest—somehow I feel the globe itself
swift-swimming in space;
Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone—haply from endless
store, God-sent,
(For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense,)
Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told,
and cannot tell,
Art thou not universal concrete’s distillation? Law‘s, all
Astronomy’s last refinement?
Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?
OLD CHANTS
An ancient song, reciting, ending,
Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All,
Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee,
Accept for me, thou saidst, the elder ballads,
And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.
(Of many debts incalculable,
Haply our New World’s chiefest debt is to old poems.)
Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays,
plays,
Shakspere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,
As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,
The great shadowy groups gathering around,
Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,
Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous
hand and word, ascending,
Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent
with their music,
Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,
Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.
A CHRISTMAS GREETING
From a Northern Star-Group to a Southern, 1889-90.
Welcome, Brazilian brother—thy ample place is ready;
A loving hand—a smile from the north—a sunny instant hail!
(Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,
impedimentas,
Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the acceptance
and the faith;)
To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck—to thee from
us the expectant eye,
Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning well,
The true lesson of a nation’s light in the sky,
(More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,)
The height to be superb humanity.
SOUNDS OF THE WINTER
Sounds of the winter too,
Sunshine upon the mountains—many a distant strain
From cheery railroad train—from nearer field, barn, house,
The whispering air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn,
Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of
flail,
An old man’s garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out
yet,
Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.
A TWILIGHT SONG
As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame,
Musing on long-pass’d war scenes—of the countless buried<
br />
unknown soldiers,
Of the vacant names, as unindented air’s and sea‘s—the
unreturn’d,
The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the
deep-fill’d trenches
Of gather’d dead from all America, North, South, East, West,
whence they came up,
From wooded Maine, New-England’s farms, from fertile
Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio,
From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the Carolinas,
Texas,
(Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights in the noiseless
flickering flames,
Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising-I hear the
rhythmic tramp of the armies;)
You million unwrit names all, all—you dark bequest from all the
war,
A special verse for you—a flash of duty long neglected—your
mystic roll strangely gather’d here,
Each name recall’d by me from out the darkness and death’s
ashes,
Henceforth to be, deep, deep within my heart recording, for
many a future year,
Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or
South,
Embalm’d with love in this twilight song.
WHEN THE FULL-GROWN POET CAME
When the full-grown poet came,
Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its
shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;
But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and
unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;
—Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each
by the hand;
And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding
hands,
Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,
And wholly and joyously blends them.
OSCEOLA127
[When I was nearly grown to manhood in Brooklyn, New York, (middle of 1838,) I met one of the return’d U.S. Marines from Fort Moultrie, S.C., and had long talks with him—leam’d the occurrence below described—death of Osceola. The latter was a young, brave, leading Seminole in the Florida war of that time—was surrender’ d to our troops, imprison’d and literally died of “a broken heart,” at Fort Moultrie. He sicken’d of his confinement—the doctor and officers made every allowance and kindness possible for him; then the close:]
When his hour for death had come,
He slowly rais’d himself from the bed on the floor,
Drew on his war-dress, shirt, leggings, and girdled the belt around
his waist,
Call’d for vermilion paint (his looking-glass was held before him,)
Painted half his face and neck, his wrists, and back-hands.
Put the scalp-knife carefully in his belt—then lying down, resting
a moment,
Rose again, half sitting, smiled, gave in silence his extended hand
to each and all,
Sank faintly low to the floor (tightly grasping the tomahawk
handle,)
Fix’d his look on wife and little children—the last:
(And here a line in memory of his name and death.)
A VOICE FROM DEATH128
(The Johnstown, Penn., cataclysm, May 31, 1889.)
A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and
power,
With sudden, indescribable blow—towns drown‘d—humanity by
thousands slain,
The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron
bridge,
Dash’d pell-mell by the blow—yet usher’d life continuing on,
(Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling, wild debris,
A suffering woman saved—a baby safely born!)
Although I come and unannounc‘d, in horror and in pang,
In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale elemental crash, (this
voice so solemn, strange,)
I too a minister of Deity.
Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
We mourn the old, the young untimely drawn to thee,
The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
The household wreck‘d, the husband and the wife the engulf’d
forger in his forge,
The corpses in the whelming waters and the mud,
The gather’d thousands to their funeral mounds, and thousands
never found or gather’d.
Then after burying, mourning the dead,
(Faithful to them found or unfound, forgetting not, bearing the
past, here new musing,)
A day—a passing moment or an hour—America itself bends
low,
Silent, resign‘d, submissive.
War, death, cataclysm like this, America,
Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart.
E‘en as I chant, lo! out of death, and out of ooze and slime,
The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy, help, love,
From West and East, from South and North and over sea,
Its hot-spurr’d hearts and hands humanity to human aid moves on;
And from within a thought and lesson yet.
Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air!
Thou waters that encompass us!
Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep!
Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all,
incessant!
Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless,
calm,
Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
How ill to e‘er forget thee!
For I too have forgotten,
(Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
wealth, inventions, civilization,)
Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
mighty, elemental throes,
In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy’d.
A PERSIAN LESSON
For his o‘erarching and last lesson the graybeard sufi,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.
“Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,
Allah is all, all, all—is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah,
Allah is there.
”Has the estray wander’d far? Is the reason-why strangely
hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every
life;
The something never still‘d—never entirely gone? the invisible
need of every seed?
“It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception.”
THE COMMONPLACE
The commonplace I sing;
How cheap is health! how cheap nobility!
Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;
The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,
(Take here the mainest lesson—less from books—less from the
schools,)
The common day and night—the common earth and waters,
Your farm—your work, trade, occupation,
The democratic wisdom under
neath, like solid ground for all.
“THE ROUNDED CATALOGUE DIVINE COMPLETE”
[Sunday,—.——Went this forenoon to church. A college professor, Rev. Dr.—, gave us a fine sermon, during which I caught the above words; but the minister included in his “rounded catalogue” letter and spirit, only the esthetic things, and entirely ignored what I name in the following:]
The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas‘d,
The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage,
The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant,
Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the
dissolute;
(What is the part the wicked and the loathesome bear within
earth’s orbic scheme?)
Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot.
MIRAGES129
(Noted verbatim after a supper-talk out doors in Nevada with two old miners.)
More experiences and sights, stranger, than you’d think for;
Times again, now mostly just after sunrise or before
sunset,
Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear weather,
in plain sight,
Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the shop
fronts,
(Account for it or not—credit or not—it is all true,
And my mate there could tell you the like—we have often
confab’d about it,)
People and scenes, animals, trees, colors and lines, plain as
could be,
Farms and dooryards of home, paths border’d with box, lilacs in
corners,
Weddings in churches, thanksgiving dinners, returns of long-
absent sons,
Glum funerals, the crape-veil’d mother and the daughters,
Trials in courts, jury and judge, the accused in the box,
Contestants, battles, crowds, bridges, wharves,
Now and then mark’d faces of sorrow or joy,