Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (17 page)

 

I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
And tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drowned.

 

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of
the steamship, and death chasing it up and down the
storm,
²²
How he knuckled tight and gave not back one inch, and was
faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalked in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, We will
not desert you;
How he saved the drifting company at last,
How the lank loose-gowned women looked when boated from the
side of their prepared graves,
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the
sharp-lipped unshaved men;
All this I swallow and it tastes good .... I like it well, and it
becomes mine,
I am the man .... I suffered .... I was there.

 

The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood,
and her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence,
blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,
The murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.

 

I am the hounded slave .... I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me .... crack and again crack the
marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence .... my gore dribs thinned with the
ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,
They taunt my dizzy ears .... they beat me violently over the
head with their whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels .... I myself
become the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

 

I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken
²³
.... tumbling
walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired .... I heard the yelling shouts of my
comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have cleared the beams away .... they tenderly lift me forth.

 

I lie in the night air in my red shirt .... the pervading hush is for
my sake,
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me .... the heads are
bared of their fire-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

 

Distant and dead resuscitate,
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me .... and I am
the clock myself.

 

I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort’s bombardment .... and am there again.

 

Again the reveille of drummers .... again the attacking cannon
and mortars and howitzers,
Again the attacked send their cannon responsive.

 

I take part .... I see and hear the whole,
The cries and curses and roar .... the plaudits for well aimed
shots,
The ambulanza slowly passing and trailing its red drip,
Workmen searching after damages and to make indispensable
repairs,
The fall of grenades through the rent roof .... the fan-shaped
explosion,
The whizz of limbs heads stone wood and iron high in the air.
Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general .... he furiously
waves with his hand,
He gasps through the clot .... Mind not me .... mind .... the
entrenchments.

 

I tell not the fall of Alamo
²⁴
.... not one escaped to tell the fall of
Alamo,
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

 

Hear now the tale of a jetblack sunrise,
Hear of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve
young men.

 

Retreating they had formed in a hollow square with their baggage
for breastworks,
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s nine times
their number was the price they took in advance,
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
They treated for an honorable capitulation, received writing
and seal, gave up their arms, and marched back prisoners
of war.

 

They were the glory of the race of rangers,
Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a supper or a courtship,
Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud and
affectionate,
Bearded, sunburnt, dressed in the free costume of hunters,
Not a single one over thirty years of age.

 

The second Sunday morning they were brought out in squads
and massacred .... it was beautiful early summer,
The work commenced about five o‘clock and was over
by eight.

 

None obeyed the command to kneel,
Some made a mad and helpless rush .... some stood stark and
straight,
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart .... the living and
dead lay together,

The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt .... the new-comers
saw them there;
Some half-killed attempted to crawl away,
These were dispatched with bayonets or battered with the blunts
of muskets;
A youth not seventeen years old seized his assassin till two more
came to release him,
The three were all torn, and covered with the boy’s blood.

 

At eleven o‘clock began the burning of the bodies;
And that is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve
young men,
And that was a jetblack sunrise.

 

Did you read in the seabooks of the oldfashioned frigate-fight?
²⁵
Did you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?

 

Our foe was no skulk in his ship, I tell you,
His was the English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and
never was, and never will be;
Along the lowered eve he came, horribly raking us.

 

We closed with him .... the yards entangled .... the cannon
touched,
My captain lashed fast with his own hands.

 

We had received some eighteen-pound shots under the water,
On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire,
killing all around and blowing up overhead.

 

Ten o‘clock at night, and the full moon shining and the leaks on
the gain, and five feet of water reported,
The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after
hold to give them a chance for themselves.

 

The transit to and from the magazine was now stopped by the
sentinels,
They saw so many strange faces they did not know whom to
trust.

 

Our frigate was afire .... the other asked if we demanded quarters? if our colors were struck and the fighting done?

 

I laughed content when I heard the voice of my little captain,
We have not struck, he composedly cried, We have just begun
our part of the fighting.

 

Only three guns were in use,
One was directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s
mainmast,
Two well-served with grape and canister silenced his musketry
and cleared his decks.

 

The tops alone seconded the fire of this little battery, especially
the maintop,
They all held out bravely during the whole of the action.

Not a moment’s cease,
The leaks gained fast on the pumps .... the fire eat toward the
powder-magazine,
One of the pumps was shot away .... it was generally thought we
were sinking.

 

Serene stood the little captain,
He was not hurried .... his voice was neither high nor low,
His eyes gave more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

Toward twelve at night, there in the beams of the moon they surrendered to us.

 

Stretched and still lay the midnight,
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking .... preparations to pass to
the one we had conquered,

The captain on the quarter deck coldly giving his orders through
a countenance white as a sheet,
Near by the corpse of the child that served in the cabin,
The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully
curled whiskers,
The flames spite of all that could be done flickering aloft and below,
The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves .... dabs of
flesh upon the masts and spars,
The cut of cordage and dangle of rigging .... the slight shock of
the soothe of waves,
Black and impassive guns, and litter of powder-parcels, and the
strong scent,
Delicate sniffs of the seabreeze .... smells of sedgy grass and fields
by the shore .... death-messages given in charge to survivors,
The hiss of the surgeon’s knife and the gnawing teeth of his saw,
The wheeze, the cluck, the swash of falling blood .... the short
wild scream, the long dull tapering groan,
These so .... these irretrievable.

 

O Christ! My fit is mastering me!
What the rebel said gaily adjusting his throat to the rope-noose,
What the savage at the stump, his eye-sockets empty, his mouth
spirting whoops and defiance,
What stills the traveler come to the vault at Mount Vernon,
What sobers the Brooklyn boy as he looks down the shores of the
Wallabout and remembers the prison ships,
What burnt the gums of the redcoat at Saratoga when he
surrendered his brigades,
These become mine and me every one, and they are but little,
I become as much more as I like.

 

I become any presence or truth of humanity here,
And see myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

 

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep
watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barred at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to the jail, but I am handcuffed
to him and walk by his side,
I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat
on my twitching lips.

 

Not a youngster is taken for larceny, but I go too and am tried and sentenced.

 

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at the last
gasp,
My face is ash-colored, my sinews gnarl .... away from me
people retreat.

 

Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg.

 

I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,
The whirling and whirling is elemental within me.

 

Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and
dreams and gaping,
I discover myself on a verge of the usual mistake.

 

That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
bloody crowning!

 

I remember .... I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it .... or
to any graves,
The corpses rise .... the gashes heal .... the fastenings roll
away.

 

I troop forth replenished with supreme power, one of an average
unending procession,
We walk the roads of Ohio and Massachusetts and Virginia and
Wisconsin and New York and New Orleans and Texas and
Montreal and San Francisco and Charleston and Savannah
and Mexico,
Inland and by the seacoast and boundary lines .... and we pass
the boundary lines.

 

Our swift ordinances are on their way over the whole earth,
The blossoms we wear in our hats are the growth of two thousand
years.

 

Eleves
^r
I salute you,
I see the approach of your numberless gangs .... I see you
understand yourselves and me,
And know that they who have eyes are divine, and the blind and
lame are equally divine,
And that my steps drag behind yours yet go before them,
And are aware how I am with you no more than I am with
everybody.

 

The friendly and flowing savage .... Who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization or past it and mastering it?

 

Is he some southwesterner raised outdoors? Is he Canadian?
Is he from the Mississippi country? or from Iowa, Oregon or
California? or from the mountain? or prairie life or bush-life?
or from the sea?

 

Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
They desire he should like them and touch them and speak to
them and stay with them.

 

Behaviour lawless as snow-flakes .... words simple as grass ....
uncombed head and laughter and naivete;
Slowstepping feet and the common features, and the common
modes and emanations,
They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,
They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath .... they fly
out of the glance of his eyes.