The Complete Walt Whitman: Drum-Taps, Leaves of Grass, Patriotic Poems, Complete Prose Works, The Wound Dresser, Letters (Best Navigation, Active TOC) (A to Z Classics) E-Book

Anne Gilchrist

• Herausgeber: A to Z Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

With A to Z Classics, discover or rediscover all the classics of literature. (New font)Contains Active Table of Contents (HTML)Walt Whitman is widely regarded as one of the greats of American literature, despite causing great controversy in his own era, due to the apparent 'obscenity' of his works – in particular for his poetic masterpiece “Leaves of Grass”.This huge collection contains ALL of Walt Whitman's works – both poetry and prose. These have been separated into chapters based on the books in which they were originally published, and are as follows:Drum-TapsLeaves of GrassThe Patriotic Poems of Walt WhitmanThe Complete Prose WorksThe Wound DresserThe Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman.

Leseprobe

Table des matières

DRUM-TAPS

LEAVES OF GRASS

THE PATRIOTIC POEMS OF WALT WHITMAN

COMPLETE PROSE WORKS

THEWOUND DRESSER

Table des matières

INTRODUCTION

DRUM-TAPS

FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE.

EIGHTEEN SIXTY-ONE.

BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!

FROM PAUMANOK STARTING I FLY LIKE A BIRD

SONG OF THE BANNER AT DAYBREAK.

RISE O DAYS FROM YOUR FATHOMLESS DEEPS.

1

2

3

VIRGINIA—THE WEST.

CITY OF SHIPS.

THE CENTENARIAN'S STORY.

CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD.

BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE.

AN ARMY CORPS ON THE MARCH.

BY THE BIVOUAC'S FITFUL FLAME.

COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER.

VIGIL STRANGE I KEPT ON THE FIELD ONE NIGHT.

A MARCH IN THE RANKS HARD-PREST, AND THE ROAD UNKNOWN.

A SIGHT IN CAMP IN THE DAYBREAK GRAY AND DIM.

AS TOILSOME I WANDER'D VIRGINIA'S WOODS.

NOT THE PILOT.

YEAR THAT TREMBLED AND REEL'D BENEATH ME.

THE WOUND-DRESSER.

1

2

3

4

LONG, TOO LONG AMERICA.

GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN.

1

2

DIRGE FOR TWO VETERANS.

OVER THE CARNAGE ROSE PROPHETIC A VOICE.

I SAW OLD GENERAL AT BAY.

THE ARTILLERYMAN'S VISION.

ETHIOPIA SALUTING THE COLOURS.

NOT YOUTH PERTAINS TO ME.

RACE OF VETERANS.

WORLD TAKE GOOD NOTICE.

O TAN-FACED PRAIRIE-BOY.

LOOK DOWN FAIR MOON.

RECONCILIATION.

HOW SOLEMN AS ONE BY ONE.

(Washington City, 1865.)

AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO.

DELICATE CLUSTER.

TO A CERTAIN CIVILIAN.

LO, VICTRESS ON THE PEAKS.

SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE.

(Washington City, 1865.)

ADIEU TO A SOLDIER.

TURN O LIBERTAD.

TO THE LEAVEN'D SOIL THEY TROD.

INTRODUCTION

When the first days of August loured over the world, time seemed to stand still. A universal astonishment and confusion fell, as upon a flock of sheep perplexed by strange dogs. But now, though never before was a St. Lucy's Day so black with "absence, darkness, death," Christmas is gone. Spring comes swiftly, the almond trees flourish. Easter will soon be here. Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise. Yet still a kind of instinctive blindness blots out the prospect of the future. Until the long horror of the war is gone from our minds, we shall be able to think of nothing that has not for its background a chaotic darkness. Like every obsession, it gnaws at thought, follows us into our dreams and returns with the morning. But there have been other wars. And humanity, after learning as best it may their brutal lesson, has survived them. Just as the young soldier leaves home behind him and accepts hardship and danger as to the manner born, so, when he returns again, life will resume its old quiet wont. Nature is not idle even in the imagination. It is man's salvation to forget no less than it is his salvation to remember. And it is wise even in the midst of the conflict to look back on those that are past and to prepare for the returning problems of the future.

When Whitman wrote his "Democratic Vistas," the long embittered war between the Northern and Southern States of America was a thing only of yesterday. It is a headlong amorphous production—a tangled meadow of "leaves of grass" in prose. But it is as cogent to-day as it was when it was written:

    To the ostent of the senses and eyes [he writes], the influences    which stamp the world's history are wars, uprisings, or downfalls    of dynasties.... These, of course, play their part; yet, it may    be, a single new thought, imagination, abstract principle ... put    in shape by some great literatus, and projected among mankind,    may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the    longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely    political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.

The literatus who realized this had his own message in mind. And yet, justly. For those who might point to the worldly prosperity and material comforts of his country, and ask, Are not these better indeed than any utterances even of greatest rhapsodic, artist, or literatus? he has his irrefutable answer. He surveys the New York of 1870, "its façades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance of design," etc., in his familiar catalogical jargon, and shutting his eyes to its glow and grandeur, inquires in return, Are there indeed men here worthy the name? Are there perfect women? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one? We ourselves in good time shall have to face and to answer these questions. They search our keenest hopes of the peace that is coming. And we may be fortified perhaps by the following queer proof of history repeating itself:

    Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior    appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea    of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside    acquisition—never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the    test, the emulation—more loftily elevated as head and sample—    than they are on the surface of our Republican States this day.    The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of    the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.

Whitman had no very tender regard for the Germany of his time. He fancied that the Germans were like the Chinese, only less graceful and refined and more brutish. But neither had he any particular affection for any relic of Europe. "Never again will we trust the moral sense or abstract friendliness of a single Government of the Old World." He accepted selections from its literature for the new American Adam. But even its greatest poets were not America's, and though he might welcome even Juvenal, it was for use and not for worship. We have to learn, he insists, that the best culture will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect. In our children rests every hope and promise, and therefore in their mothers. "Disengage yourselves from parties.... These savage and wolfish parties alarm me.... Hold yourself judge and master over all of them." Only faith can save us, the faith in ourselves and in our fellow-men which is of the true faith in goodness and in God. The idea of the mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, filled this poet with a singular awe. Passionately he pleads for the dignity of the common people. It is the average man of a land that is important. To win the people back to a proud belief and confidence in life, to rapture in this wonderful world, to love and admiration—this was his burning desire. I demand races of orbic bards, he rhapsodizes, sweet democratic despots, to dominate and even destroy. The Future! Vistas! The throes of birth are upon us. Allons, camarado!

He could not despair. "Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?" he asks himself in "Drum-Taps." But wildest shuttlecock of criticism though he is, he has never yet been charged with looking only on the dark side of things. Once, he says, "Once, before the war (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!), I too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom." His part in it soothed, mellowed, deepened his great nature. He had himself witnessed such misery, cruelty, and abomination as it is best just now, perhaps, not to read about. One fact alone is enough; that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. During 1862-65 he visited, he says, eighty to a hundred thousand sick and wounded soldiers, comprehending all, slighting none. Rebel or compatriot, it made no difference. "I loved the young man," he cries again and again. Pity and fatherliness were in his face, for his heart was full of them. Mr. Gosse has described "the old Gray" as he saw him in 1884, in his bare, littered sun-drenched room in Camden, shared by kitten and canary:

    He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as    if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than    other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards. With    his head so poised and the whole man fixed in contemplation of    the interlocutor he seemed to pass into a state of absolute    passivity ... the glassy eyes half closed, the large knotted    hands spread out before him. He resembled, in fact, nothing so    much as "a great old grey Angora Tom," alert in repose, serenely    blinking under his combed waves of hair, with eyes inscrutably    dreaming.... As I stood in dull, deserted Mickle Street once    more, my heart was full of affection for this beautiful old man    ... this old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience    and philosophy.

Whitman was then sixty-five. In a portrait of thirty years before there is just a wraith of that feline dream, perhaps, but it is a face of a rare grace and beauty that looks out at us, of a profound kindness and compassion. And, in the eyes, not so much penetration as visionary absorption. Such was the man to whom nothing was unclean, nothing too trivial (except "pale poetlings lisping cadenzas piano," who then apparently thronged New York) to take to himself. Intensest, indomitablest of individualists, he exulted in all that appertains to that forked radish, Man. This contentious soul of mine, he exclaims ecstatically; Viva: the attack! I have been born the same as the war was born; I lull nobody, and you will never understand me: maybe I am non-literary and un-decorous.... I have written impromptu, and shall let it all go at that. Let me at least be human! Human, indeed, he was, a tender, all-welcoming host of Everyman, of his idolized (if somewhat overpowering) American democracy. Man in the street, in his swarms, poor crazed faces in the State asylum, prisoners in Sing Sing, prostitute, whose dead body reminded him not of a lost soul, but only of a sad, forlorn, and empty house—it mattered not; he opened his heart to them, one and all. "I see beyond each mark that wonder, a kindred soul. O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend."

  The moon gives you light,  And the bugles and drums give you music,  And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,  My heart gives you love.

"Yours for you," he exclaims, welding in a phrase his unparalleled egotism, his beautiful charity, "yours for you, who ever you are, as mine for me." It is the essence of philosophy and of religion, for all the wonders of heaven and earth are significant "only because of the Me in the centre."

This was the secret of his tender, unassuming ministrations. He had none of that shrinking timidity, that fear of intrusion, that uneasiness in the presence of the tragic and the pitiful, which so often numb and oppress those who would willingly give themselves and their best to the needy and suffering, but whose intellect misgives them. He was that formidable phenomenon, a dreamer of action. But he possessed a sovran good sense. Food and rest and clean clothes were his scrupulous preparation for his visits. He always assumed as cheerful an appearance as possible. Armed with bright new five-cent and ten-cent bills (the wounded, he found, were often "broke," and the sight of a little money "helped their spirits"), with books and stationery and tobacco, for one a twist of good strong green tea, for another a good home-made rice-pudding, or a jar of sparkling but innocent blackberry and cherry syrup, a small bottle of horse-radish pickle, or a large handsome apple, he would "make friends." "What I have I also give you," he cried from the bottom of his grieved, tempestuous heart. He would talk, or write letters—passionate love-letters, too—or sit silent, in mute and tender kindness. "Long, long, I gazed ... leaning my chin in my hands, passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours, with you, dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word, Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier." And how many a mother must have blessed the stranger who could bring such last news of a son as this: "And now like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy—yet there is a text, 'God doeth all things well'—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul." It is only love that can comfort the loving.

He forced nothing on these friends of a day, so many of them near their last farewell. A poor wasted young man asks him to read a chapter in the New Testament, and Whitman chooses that which describes Christ's Crucifixion. He "ask'd me to read the following chapter also, how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, for he was feeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask'd me if I enjoy'd religion. I said 'Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, yet maybe, it is the same thing.'" This is only one of many such serene intimacies in Whitman's experiences of the war. Through them we reach to an understanding of a poet who chose not signal and beautiful episodes out of the past, nor the rare moments of existence, for theme, but took all life, within and around him in vast bustling America, for his poetic province. Like a benign barbaric sun he surveys the world, ever at noon. I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there, he cries in the "Song of Myself." I do not despise you priests, all times, the world over.... He could not despise anything, not even his fellow-poets, because he himself was everything. His verse sometimes seems mere verbiage, but it is always a higgledy-piggledy, Santa Claus bagful of things. And he could penetrate to the essential reality. He tells in his "Drum-Taps" how one daybreak he arose in camp, and saw three still forms stretched out in the eastern radiance, how with light fingers he just lifted the blanket from each cold face in turn: the first elderly, gaunt, and grim—Who are you, my dear comrade? The next with cheeks yet blooming—Who are you, sweet boy? The third—Young man, I think I know you. I think this face is the face of the Christ Himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

True poetry focuses experience, not merely transmits it. It must redeem it for ever from transitoriness and evanescence. Whitman incontinently pours experience out in a Niagara-like cataract. But in spite of his habitual publicity he was at heart of a "shy, brooding, impassioned devotional type"; in spite of his self-conscious, arrogant virility, he was to the end of his life an entranced child. He came into the world, saw and babbled. His deliberate method of writing could have had no other issue. A subject would occur to him, a kind of tag. He would scribble it down on a scrap of paper and drop it into a drawer. Day by day this first impulse would evoke fresh "poemets," until at length the accumulation was exhaustive. Then he merely gutted his treasury and the ode was complete. It was only when sense and feeling attained a sort of ecstasy that he succeeded in distilling the true essence that is poetry and in enstopping it in a crystal phial of form.

The prose of his "Specimen Days," indeed, is often nearer to poetry than his verse:

    Much of the time he sleeps, or half sleeps.... I often come and    sit by him in perfect silence; he will breathe for ten minutes as    softly and evenly as a young babe asleep. Poor youth, so    handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time    as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, without    the least start awaken'd, open'd his eyes, gave me a long steady    look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier—one long,    clear, silent look—a slight sigh—then turn'd back and went into    his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the    heart of the stranger that hover'd near.    The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening has    never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something,    as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.    The sky dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the    moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that    great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west,    suffused the soul. Then I heard slow and clear the deliberate    notes of a bugle come up out of the silence ... firm and    faithful, floating along, rising, falling leisurely, with here    and there a long-drawn note.... sounding tattoo.

"A steady rain, dark and thick and warm," he writes again, two days after Gettysburg. "The cavalry camp is a ceaseless field of observation to me. This forenoon there stood the horses, tether'd together, dripping, steaming, chewing their hay. The men emerge from their tents, dripping also. The fires are half-quench'd." There is a poetic poise in this brief, vivid statement, apart from its bare economy of means. It is the lump awaiting the leaven no less than is "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." To this supreme spectator an apple orchard in May, even the White House in moonlight, no more and no less than these battle-scenes, rendered up their dignity, life, and beauty, their true human significance. But in "Drum-Taps" the witness is not always so satisfactory. The secret has evaporated in the effort to make poetry, or half-consciously to inject a moral, to play the Universal Bard. There creeps into the words a tinge of the raw and the grotesque. The poet has the look of a cowboy off the stage, tanned with grease-paint. But again and again the secret creeps back and some lovely emanation of poetry is added to it:

  Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,  Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen,            purple,  On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,  Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.

Or this, called "Reconciliation":

  Word over all, beautiful as the sky,  Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be            utterly lost,  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash            again, and ever again, this soil'd world;  For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,  I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw            near,  Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the            coffin.

The bonds of rhyme shackled him, deprived him of more than freedom. He is like a wild bird that suddenly perceives the bars of its small cage across the blue of the sky. And yet the finer his poems are, the nearer they approach to definite rhythmical design. One has only to compare "O Captain! my Captain!" with "Hushed be the Camps To-day" to perceive this curious paradox. They are both of them memories of his beloved Lincoln, whom he had many times seen, with that peculiarly close and transatlantic curiosity of his, riding at a jog-trot, on a good-sized, easy-going grey horse, with his escort of yellow-striped cavalry behind him, through the streets of Washington—dressed in black, somewhat rusty and dusty, with a black, stiff hat, almost as ordinary in attire as the commonest man. That heroic face, too, he had pierced; and caught from it the deep, subtle, indirect expression, that only the long-gone master-painters of the Old World could have seized and immortalized. And in yet another memory of this great American Whitman attains to his best and highest, "When Lilacs Last in the Doorway Bloom'd." It is one of the most beautiful of poems, of the purest intuition, of a consummate, if unconscious, artistry. Whose voice is it that rings and echoes, now low and tender, now solemn and desolate, now clear, full, victorious, out of its cloistral solitude—that of the mourner himself, of all-heedfull, heedless Nature, of the immortal soul of man, or just a bird, the shy and hidden, sweet, small hermit thrush? The last division of his life's work—his fond Epic, his cosmic "inventory"—as Whitman planned it, was to be devoted to the chaunting of songs of death and immortality. The soldier to whom he read of Christ's Resurrection talked of death to him, and said he did not fear it. He talked to a man who did not enjoy religion in the way a Christian means, to whom the mystery of Easter is an all-sufficing "reliance." But Whitman not only did not fear death. The thought of it was to him the strangest of raptures, the reverie of a child dreaming of a distant mother, soon to come again. Death and immortality were but two aspects of the same blessed hope to this man, who poured out his life in a turgid fount of ecstatic joy in living:

  ... And I saw askant the armies,  I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,  Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I            saw them,  And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,  And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),  And the staffs all splintered and broken.  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,  And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,  I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,  But I saw they were not as was thought,  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,  The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,  And the wives and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,  And the armies that remain'd suffer'd....  Come lovely and soothing death,  Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,  In the night, in the day, to all, to each,  Sooner or later delicate death.  Prais'd be the fathomless universe,  For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,  And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!  For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.  Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet  Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?  Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,  I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come            unfalteringly.

DRUM-TAPS

FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE.

  First O songs for a prelude,  Lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum pride and joy in my city,  How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,  How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,  (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!  O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than            steel!)  How you sprang—how you threw off the costumes of peace with            indifferent hand,  How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard            in their stead,  How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of            soldiers,)  How Manhattan drum-taps led.  Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading,  Forty years as a pageant, still unawares the lady of this teeming and            turbulent city,  Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,  With her million children around her, suddenly,  At dead of night, at news from the south,  Incens'd struck with clinch'd hand the pavement.  A shock electric, the night sustain'd it,  Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour'd out its myriads.  From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,  Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.  To the drum-taps prompt,  The young men falling in and arming,  The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith's            hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)  The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the            court,  The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing            the reins abruptly down on the horses' backs,  The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all            leaving;  Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm,  The new recruits, even boys, the old men show them how to wear their            accoutrements, they buckle the straps carefully,  Outdoors arming, indoors arming, the flash of the musketbarrels,  The white tents cluster in camps, the arm'd sentries around, the            sunrise cannon and again at sunset,  Arm'd regiments arrive every day, pass through the city, and embark            from the wharves,  (How good they look as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with            their guns on their shoulders!  How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces and            their clothes and knapsacks cover'd with dust!)  The blood of the city up—arm'd! arm'd! the cry everywhere,  The flags flung out from the steeples of churches and from all the            public buildings and stores,  The tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son kisses his            mother,  (Loth is the mother to part, yet not a word does she speak to detain            him,)  The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the            way,  The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their            favorites,  The artillery, the silent cannons bright as gold, drawn along, rumble            lightly over the stones,  (Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence,  Soon unlimber'd to begin the red business;)  All the mutter of preparation, all the determin'd arming,  The hospital service, the lint, bandages and medicines,  The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in earnest, no            mere parade now;  War! an arm'd race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning            away;  War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm'd race is advancing to            welcome it.  Mannahatta a-march—and it's O to sing it well!  It's O for a manly life in the camp.  And the sturdy artillery,  The guns bright as gold, the work for giants, to serve well the guns,  Unlimber them! (no more as the past forty years for salutes for            courtesies merely,  Put in something now besides powder and wadding.)  And you lady of ships, you Mannahatta,  Old matron of this proud, friendly, turbulent city,  Often in peace and wealth you were pensive or covertly frown'd amid            all your children,  But now you smile with joy exulting old Mannahatta.

EIGHTEEN SIXTY-ONE.

  Arm'd year—year of the struggle,  No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year,  Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas            piano,  But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing,            carrying a rifle on your shoulder,  With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in            the belt at your side,  As I heard you shouting loud, your sonorous voice ringing across the            continent,  Your masculine voice O year, as rising amid the great cities,  Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you as one of the workmen, the            dwellers in Manhattan,  Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and            Indiana,  Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait and descending the            Alleghanies,  Or down from the great lakes or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along the            Ohio river,  Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at            Chattanooga on the mountain top,  Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs clothed in blue, bearing            weapons, robust year,  Heard your determin'd voice launch'd forth again and again,  Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannon,  I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.

BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!

  Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!  Through the windows-through doors-burst like a ruthless force,  Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,  Into the school where the scholar is studying;  Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with            his bride,  Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering            his grain,  So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.  Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!  Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;  Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers            must sleep in those beds,  No bargainers' bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they            continue?  Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?  Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the            judge?  Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.  Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!  Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,  Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,  Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,  Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,  Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the            hearses,  So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.

FROM PAUMANOK STARTING I FLY LIKE A BIRD

  From Paumanok starting I fly like a bird,  Around and around to soar to sing the idea of all,  To the north betaking myself to sing there arctic songs,  To Kanada till I absorb Kanada in myself, to Michigan then,  To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs, (they are            inimitable;)  Then to Ohio and Indiana to sing theirs, to Missouri and Kansas and            Arkansas to sing theirs,  To Tennessee and Kentucky, to the Carolinas and Georgia to sing            theirs,  To Texas and so along up toward California, to roam accepted            everywhere;  To sing first, (to the tap of the war-drum if need be,)  The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable,  And then the song of each member of these States.

SONG OF THE BANNER AT DAYBREAK.

  Poet.  O a new song, a free song,  Flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, by sounds, by voices clearer,  By the wind's voice and that of the drum,  By the banner's voice and child's voice and sea's voice and father's            voice,  Low on the ground and high in the air,  On the ground where father and child stand,  In the upward air where their eyes turn,  Where the banner at daybreak is flapping.  Words! bookwords! what are you?  Words no more, for hearken and see,  My song is there in the open air, and I must sing,  With the banner and pennant a-flapping.  I'll weave the chord and twine in,  Man's desire and babe's desire, I'll twine them in, I'll put in life,  I'll put the bayonet's flashing point, I'll let bullets and slugs            whizz,  (As one carrying a symbol and menace far into the future,  Crying with trumpet voice, Arouse and beware! Beware and arouse!)  I'll pour the verse with streams of blood, full of volition, full of            joy.  Then loosen, launch forth, to go and compete,  With the banner and pennant a-flapping.  Pennant.  Come up here, bard, bard,  Come up here, soul, soul,  Come up here, dear little child,  To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless            light.  Child.  Father what is that in the sky beckoning to me with long finger?  And what does it say to me all the while?  Father.  Nothing my babe you see in the sky,  And nothing at all to you it says—but look you my babe,  Look at these dazzling things in the houses, and see you the            money-shops opening,  And see you the vehicles preparing to crawl along the streets with            goods;  These, ah these, how valued and toil'd for these!  How envied by all the earth.  Poet.  Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high,  On floats the sea in distant blue careering through its channels,  On floats the wind over the breast of the sea setting in toward land,  The great steady wind from west or west-by-south,  Floating so buoyant with milk-white foam on the waters.  But I am not the sea nor the red sun,  I am not the wind with girlish laughter,  Not the immense wind which strengthens, not the wind which lashes,  Not the spirit that ever lashes its own body to terror and death,  But I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings,  Which babbles in brooks and scoots in showers on the land,  Which the birds know in the woods mornings and evenings,  And the shore-sands know and the hissing wave, and that banner and            pennant,  Aloft there flapping and flapping.  Child.  O father it is alive—it is full of people—it has children,  O now it seems to me it is talking to its children,  I hear it—it talks to me—O it is wonderful!  O it stretches—it spreads and runs so fast—O my father,  It is so broad it covers the whole sky.  Father.  Cease, cease, my foolish babe,  What you are saying is sorrowful to me, much it displeases me;  Behold with the rest again I say, behold not banners and pennants            aloft,  But the well-prepared pavements behold, and mark the solid-wall'd            houses.  Banner and Pennant.  Speak to the child O bard out of Manhattan,  To our children all, or north or south of Manhattan,  Point this day, leaving all the rest, to us over all—and yet we know            not why,  For what are we, mere strips of cloth profiting nothing,  Only flapping in the wind?  Poet.  I hear and see not strips of cloth alone,  I hear the tramp of armies, I hear the challenging sentry,  I hear the jubilant shouts of millions of men, I hear Liberty!  I hear the drums beat and the trumpets blowing,  I myself move abroad swift-rising flying then,  I use the wings of the land-bird and use the wings of the sea-bird,            and look down as from a height,  I do not deny the precious results of peace, I see populous cities            with wealth incalculable,  I see numberless farms, I see the farmers working in their fields or            barns,  I see mechanics working, I see buildings everywhere founded, going            up, or finished,  I see trains of cars swiftly speeding along railroad tracks drawn by            the locomotives,  I see the stores, depots, of Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New            Orleans,  I see far in the West the immense area of grain, I dwell awhile            hovering,  I pass to the lumber forests of the North, and again to the Southern            plantation, and again to California;  Sweeping the whole I see the countless profit, the busy gatherings,            earn'd wages,  See the Identity formed out of thirty-eight spacious and haughty            States, (and many more to come,)  See forts on the shores of harbors, see ships sailing in and out;  Then over all, (aye! aye!) my little and lengthen'd pennant shaped            like a sword,  Runs swiftly up indicating war and defiance—and now the halyards            have rais'd it,  Side of my banner broad and blue, side of my starry banner,  Discarding peace over all the sea and land.  Banner and Pennant.  Yet louder, higher, stronger, bard! yet farther, wider cleave!  No longer let our children deem us riches and peace alone,  We may be terror and carnage, and are so now,  Not now are we any one of these spacious and haughty States, (nor any            five, nor ten,)  Nor market nor depot we, nor money-bank in the city,  But these and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines            below, are ours,  And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small,  And the fields they moisten, and the crops and the fruits are ours,  Bays and channels and ships sailing in and out are ours—while we            over all,  Over the area spread below, the three or four millions of square            miles, the capitals,  The forty millions of people,—O bard! in life and death supreme,  We, even we, henceforth flaunt out masterful, high up above,  Not for the present alone, for a thousand years chanting through you,  This song to the soul of one poor little child.  Child.  O my father I like not the houses,  They will never to me be any thing, nor do I like money,  But to mount up there I would like, O father dear, that banner I            like,  That pennant I would be and must be.  Father.  Child of mine you fill me with anguish,  To be that pennant would be too fearful,  Little you know what it is this day, and after this day, forever,  It is to gain nothing, but risk and defy every thing,  Forward to stand in front of wars—and O, such wars!—what have you            to do with them?  With passions of demons, slaughter, premature death?  Banner.  Demons and death then I sing,  Put in all, aye all will I, sword-shaped pennant for war,  And a pleasure new and ecstatic, and the prattled yearning of            children,  Blent with the sounds of the peaceful land and the liquid wash of the            sea,  And the black ships fighting on the sea envelop'd in smoke,  And the icy cool of the far, far north, with rustling cedars and            pines,  And the whirr of drums and the sound of soldiers marching, and the            hot sun shining south,  And the beach-waves combing over the beach on my Eastern shore, and            my Western shore the same,  And all between those shores, and my ever running Mississippi with            bends and chutes,  And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of            Missouri,  The Continent, devoting the whole identity without reserving an atom,  Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all and the yield            of all,  Fusing and holding, claiming, devouring the whole,  No more with tender lip, nor musical labial sound,  But out of the night emerging for good, our voice persuasive no more,  Croaking like crows here in the wind.  Poet.  My limbs, my veins dilate, my theme is clear at last,  Banner so broad advancing out of the night, I sing you haughty and            resolute,  I burst through where I waited long, too long, deafen'd and blinded,  My hearing and tongue are come to me, (a little child taught me,)  I hear from above O pennant of war your ironical call and demand,  Insensate! insensate! (yet I at any rate chant you,) O banner!  Not houses of peace indeed are you, nor any nor all their prosperity,            (if need be, you shall again have every one of those houses            to destroy them,  You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full            of comfort, built with money,  May they stand fast, then? not an hour except you above them and all            stand fast;)  O banner, not money so precious are you, not farm produce you, nor            the material good nutriment,  Nor excellent stores, nor landed on wharves from the ships,  Not the superb ships with sail-power or steam-power, fetching and            carrying cargoes,  Nor machinery, vehicles, trade, nor revenues—but you as henceforth I            see you,  Running up out of the night, bringing your cluster of stars,            (ever-enlarging stars,)  Divider of daybreak you, cutting the air, touch'd by the sun,            measuring the sky,  (Passionately seen and yearn'd for by one poor little child,  While others remain busy or smartly talking, forever teaching thrift,            thrift;)  O you up there! O pennant! where you undulate like a snake hissing so            curious,  Out of reach, an idea only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody            death, loved by me,  So loved—O you banner leading the day with stars brought from the            night!  Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all—(absolute            owner of all)—O banner and pennant!  I too leave the rest—great as it is, it is nothing—houses, machines            are nothing—I see them not,  I see but you, O warlike pennant! O banner so broad, with stripes, I            sing you only,  Flapping up there in the wind.

RISE O DAYS FROM YOUR FATHOMLESS DEEPS.

1

  Rise O days from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer            sweep,  Long for my soul hungering gymnastic I devour'd what the earth gave            me,  Long I roam'd the woods of the north, long I watch'd Niagara pouring,  I travel'd the prairies over and slept on their breast, I cross'd the            Nevadas, I cross'd the plateaus,  I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail'd out to sea,  I sail'd through the storm, I was refresh'd by the storm,  I watch'd with joy the threatening maws of the waves,  I mark'd the white combs where they career'd so high, curling over,  I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds,  Saw from below what arose and mounted (O superb! O wild as my heart,            and powerful!)  Heard the continuous thunder as it bellow'd after the lightning,  Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning as sudden and fast            amid the din they chased each other across the sky;  These, and such as these, I, elate, saw—saw with wonder, yet pensive            and masterful,  All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me,  Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious.

2

  'Twas well, O soul—'twas a good preparation you gave me,  Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill,  Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us,  Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities,  Something for us is pouring now more than Niagara pouring,  Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the Northwest are you indeed            inexhaustible?)  What, to pavements and homesteads here, what were those storms of the            mountains and sea?  What, to passions I witness around me to-day? was the sea risen?  Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?  Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage,  Manhattan rising, advancing with menacing front—Cincinnati, Chicago,            unchain'd;  What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here,  How it climbs with daring feet and hands—how it dashes!  How the true thunder bellows after the lightning—how bright the            flashes of lightning!  How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on, shown through            the dark by those flashes of lightning!  (Yet a mournful wail and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,  In a lull of the deafening confusion.)

3

  Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! strike with vengeful stroke!  And do you rise higher than ever yet O days, O cities!  Crash heavier, heavier yet O storms! you have done me good,  My soul prepared in the mountains absorbs your immortal strong            nutriment,  Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads through farms, only            half satisfied,  One doubt nauseous undulating like a snake, crawl'd on the ground            before me,  Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically            hissing low;  The cities I loved so well I abandon'd and left, I sped to the            certainties suitable to me,  Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature's            dauntlessness,  I refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only,  I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire—on the water and air I            waited long;  But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted,  I have witness'd the true lightning, I have witness'd my cities            electric,  I have lived to behold man burst forth and warlike America rise,  Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds,  No more the mountains roam or sail the stormy sea.