Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
force, fascination?
Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action,
ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
restoring darkness.
Cluster: BY THE ROADSIDE
Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young.
Cluster: BY THE ROADSIDE
Hast never come to thee an hour,
A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles,
fashions, wealth?
These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours,
To utter nothingness?
Cluster: BY THE ROADSIDE
I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea.
Cluster: MEMORIES OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN
This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
Cluster: AUTUMN RIVULETS
1 Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
2 Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
Cluster: AUTUMN RIVULETS
Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarships, and the like; (To me all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them, except as it results to their bodies and souls, So that often to me they appear gaunt and naked, And often to me each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself, And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the rotten excrement of maggots, And often to me those men and women pass unwittingly the true realities of life, and go toward false realities, And often to me they are alive after what custom has served them, but nothing more, And often to me they are sad, hasty, unwaked sonnambules walking the dusk.)
Cluster: WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH
Of him I love day and night I dream’d I heard he was dead,
And I dream’d I went where they had buried him I love, but he was
not in that place,
And I dream’d I wander’d searching among burial-places to find him,
And I found that every place was a burial-place;
The houses full of life were equally full of death, (this house is now,)
The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago,
Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta, were as full of the dead as
of the living,
And fuller, O vastly fuller of the dead than of the living;
And what I dream’d I will henceforth tell to every person and age,
And I stand henceforth bound to what I dream’d,
And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with them,
And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere,
even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be satisfied,
And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly
render’d to powder and pour’d in the sea, I shall be satisfied,
Or if it be distributed to the winds I shall be satisfied.
Cluster: WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH
As if a phantom caress’d me, I thought I was not alone walking here by the shore; But the one I thought was with me as now I walk by the shore, the one I loved that caress’d me, As I lean and look through the glimmering light, that one has utterly disappear’d. And those appear that are hateful to me and mock me.
Cluster: WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me,
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess’d soul, eludes not,
One’s-self must never give way—that is the final substance—that
out of all is sure,
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up what but One’s-Self is sure?
Cluster: WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH
As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing, To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a wreck at sea, Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and wafted kisses, and that is the last of them, Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President, Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder’d off the Northeast coast and going down—of the steamship Arctic going down, Of the veil’d tableau-women gather’d together on deck, pale, heroic, waiting the moment that draws so close—O the moment!
A huge sob—a few bubbles—the white foam spirting up—and then the women gone, Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on—and I now pondering, Are those women indeed gone? Are souls drown’d and destroy’d so? Is only matter triumphant?
Cluster: WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH
As I watch’d the ploughman ploughing,
Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,
I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;
(Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)
Cluster: WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH
Pensive and faltering, The words the Dead I write, For living are the Dead, (Haply the only living, only real, And I the apparition, I the spectre.)
Cluster: FROM NOON TO STARRY NIGHT
1 Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician, Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night.
I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes, Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me, Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost.
2 Come nearer bodiless one, haply in thee resounds Some dead composer, haply thy pensive life Was fill’d with aspirations high, unform’d ideals, Waves, oceans musical, chaotically surging, That now ecstatic ghost, close to me bending, thy cornet echoing, pealing, Gives out to no one’s ears but mine, but freely gives to mine, That I may thee translate.
3 Blow trumpeter free and clear, I follow thee, While at thy liquid prelude, glad, serene, The fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day withdraw, A holy calm descends like dew upon me, I walk in cool refreshing night the walks of Paradise, I scent the grass, the moist air and the roses; Thy song expands my numb’d imbonded spirit, thou freest, launchest me, Floating and basking upon heaven’s lake.
4 Blow again trumpeter! and for my sensuous eyes, Bring the old pageants, show the feudal world.
What charm thy music works! thou makest pass before me, Ladies and cavaliers long dead, barons are in their castle halls, the troubadours are singing, Arm’d knights go forth to redress wrongs, some in quest of the holy Graal; I see the tournament, I see the contestants incased in heavy armor seated on stately champing horses, I hear the shouts, the sounds of blows and smiting steel; I see the Crusaders’ tumultuous armies—hark, how the cymbals clang, Lo, where the monks walk in advance, bearing the cross on high.
5 Blow again trumpeter! and for thy theme, Take now the enclosing theme of all, the solvent and the setting, Love, that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang, The heart of man and woman all for love, No other theme but love—knitting, enclosing, all-diffusing love.
O how the immortal phantoms crowd around me! I see the vast alembic ever working, I see and know the flames that heat the world, The glow, the blush, the beating hearts of lovers, So blissful happy some, and some so silent, dark, and nigh to death; Love, that is all the earth to lovers—love, that mocks time and space, Love, that is day and night—love, that is sun and moon and stars, Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume, No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.
6 Blow again trumpeter—conjure war’s alarums.
Swift to thy spell a shuddering hum like distant thunder rolls, Lo, where the arm’d men hasten—lo, mid the clouds of dust the glint of bayonets, I see the grime-faced cannoneers, I mark the rosy flash amid the smoke, I hear the cracking of the guns; Nor war alone—thy fearful music-song, wild player, brings every sight of fear, The deeds of ruthless brigands, rapine, murder—I hear the cries for help! I see ships foundering at sea, I behold on deck and below deck the terrible tableaus.
7 O trumpeter, methinks I am myself the instrument thou playest, Thou melt’st my heart, my brain—thou movest, drawest, changest them at will; And now thy sullen notes send darkness through me, Thou takest away all cheering light, all hope, I see the enslaved, the overthrown, the hurt, the opprest of the whole earth, I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race, it becomes all mine, Mine too the revenges of humanity, the wrongs of ages, baffled feuds and hatreds, Utter defeat upon me weighs—all lost—the foe victorious, (Yet ’mid the ruins Pride colossal stands unshaken to the last, Endurance, resolution to the last.)
8 Now trumpeter for thy close, Vouchsafe a higher strain than any yet, Sing to my soul, renew its languishing faith and hope, Rouse up my slow belief, give me some vision of the future, Give me for once its prophecy and joy.
O glad, exulting, culminating song! A vigor more than earth’s is in thy notes, Marches of victory—man disenthral’d—the conqueror at last, Hymns to the universal God from universal man—all joy! A reborn race appears—a perfect world, all joy! Women and men in wisdom innocence and health—all joy! Riotous laughing bacchanals fill’d with joy! War, sorrow, suffering gone—the rank earth purged—nothing but joy left! The ocean fill’d with joy—the atmosphere all joy! Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life! Enough to merely be! enough to breathe! Joy! joy! all over joy!
Cluster: FROM NOON TO STARRY NIGHT
Out of the murk of heaviest clouds,
Out of the feudal wrecks and heap’d-up skeletons of kings,
Out of that old entire European debris, the shatter’d mummeries,
Ruin’d cathedrals, crumble of palaces, tombs of priests,
Lo, Freedom’s features fresh undimm’d look forth—the same immortal
face looks forth;
(A glimpse as of thy Mother’s face Columbia,
A flash significant as of a sword,
Beaming towards thee.)
Nor think we forget thee maternal;
Lag’d’st thou so long? shall the clouds close again upon thee?
Ah, but thou hast thyself now appear’d to us—we know thee,
Thou hast given us a sure proof, the glimpse of thyself,
Thou waitest there as everywhere thy time.
Cluster: SONGS OF PARTING
As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud, A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me.
I shall go forth, I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long, Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will suddenly cease.
O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us? —and yet it is enough, O soul; O soul, we have positively appear’d—that is enough.
Cluster: SONGS OF PARTING
Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields gazing,
(As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,)
As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d,
Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my
sons, lose not an atom,
And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,
And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths,
And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s
blood trickling redden’d,
And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,
My dead absorb or South or North—my young men’s bodies absorb,
and their precious precious blood,
Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a
year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give
my immortal heroes,
Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an
atom be lost,
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.
Cluster: SONGS OF PARTING
The sobbing of the bells, the sudden death-news everywhere,
The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People,
(Full well they know that message in the darkness,
Full well return, respond within their breasts, their brains, the
sad reverberations,)
The passionate toll and clang—city to city, joining, sounding, passing,
Those heart-beats of a Nation in the night.
Cluster: SONGS OF PARTING
What are those of the known but to ascend and enter the Unknown? And what are those of life but for Death?
Cluster: SANDS AT SEVENTY
To those who’ve fail’d, in aspiration vast,
To unnam’d soldiers fallen in front on the lead,
To calm, devoted engineers—to over-ardent travelers—to pilots on
their ships,
To many a lofty song and picture without recognition—I’d rear
laurel-cover’d monument,
High, high above the rest—To all cut off before their time,
Possess’d by some strange spirit of fire,
Quench’d by an early death.
Cluster: SANDS AT SEVENTY
Approaching, nearing, curious,
Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?
Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?
Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching?
Cluster: SANDS AT SEVENTY
Upon this scene, this show,
Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
(Nor in caprice alone—some grains of deepest meaning,)
Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes,
As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill’d with its soul,
Product of Nature’s sun, stars, earth direct—a towering human form,
In hunting-shirt of film, arm’d with the rifle, a half-ironical
smile curving its phantom lips,
Like one of Ossian’s ghosts looks down.
Cluster: SANDS AT SEVENTY
A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge,
Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,
To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;
Yonnondio—I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine, with
plains and mountains dark,
I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,
As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
twilight,
(Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air
for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.
Cluster: SANDS AT SEVENTY
The two old, simple problems ever intertwined, Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled. By each successive age insoluble, pass’d on, To ours to-day—and we pass on the same.
Cluster: SANDS AT SEVENTY
While not the past forgetting,
To-day, at least, contention sunk entire—peace, brotherhood uprisen;
For sign reciprocal our Northern, Southern hands,
Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers, North or South,
(Nor for the past alone—for meanings to the future,)
Wreaths of roses and branches of palm.
Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY
A vague mist hanging ’round half the pages: (Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul, That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts, non-realities.)
Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY
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 engulfed 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.
Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY
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 shopfronts,
(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,
(I could pick them out this moment if I saw them again,)
Show’d to me—just to the right in the sky-edge,
Or plainly there to the left on the hill-tops.
Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY
Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable
masses (even to expose them,)
But add, fuse, complete, extend—and celebrate the immortal and the good.
Haughty this song, its words and scope,
To span vast realms of space and time,
Evolution—the cumulative—growths and generations.
Begun in ripen’d youth and steadily pursued,
Wandering, peering, dallying with all—war, peace, day and night
absorbing,
Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,
I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.
I sing of life, yet mind me well of death:
To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has for years—
Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.