by Whitman · Cluster: Nationalism and Patriotism · Democracy · Liberty Political Freedom
Abstract
A brief lyric arguing that America must now learn from crises of anguish, not prosperity, to reveal what its people really are; war as national test.
Connections
Themes & Concepts: Nationalism and Patriotism, War and its Cost, Common Man, Democracy Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: DRUM-TAPS
Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and
prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing,
grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children
en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse
really are?)