by Whitman · Cluster: Nature · Book of Nature · Natural Order
Abstract
The sick, aged poet addresses the cooling evening wind through his window as a spiritual, God-sent messenger linking him to nature and the cosmos.
Connections
Motifs: Wind, Nature, Window, Sun Themes & Concepts: Self and Cosmos, Mortality, Divine Love Forms & Genres: Free Verse
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY
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
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?