Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (60 page)

To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

 

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.

 

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.

 

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 splinter’d 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 wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer‘d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my
soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding
the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again
bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

 

I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing
with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

 

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full
of woe,

With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to
keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for
his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

 

 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores
a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

 

 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Hush’d be the camps to-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.

 

 

No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time’s dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps,
know it truly.

 

As they invault the coffin there,
Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

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.

By blue Ontario’s shore,
As I mused of these warlike days and of peace return‘d, and the
dead that return no more,
A Phantom gigantic superb, with stern visage accosted me,
Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America,
chant me the carol of victory,
And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet,
And sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy.

 

(Democracy, the destin’d conqueror, yet treacherous lip-smiles
everywhere,
And death and infidelity at every step.)

A Nation announcing itself,
I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,
I reject none, accept all, then reproduce all in my own forms.

 

A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,
What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,
We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,
We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,
We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety of
ourselves,
We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves,
We stand self-pois’d in the middle, branching thence over the world,
From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.

 

Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
Whatever appears, whatever does not appear, we are beautiful or
sinful in ourselves only.

 

(O Mother—O Sisters dear!
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy’d us,
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)

Have you thought there could be but a single supreme?
There can be any number of supremes—one does not countervail
another any more than one eyesight countervails another, or
one life countervails another.
All is eligible to all,
All is for individuals, all is for you,
No condition is prohibited, not God’s or any.

 

All comes by the body, only health puts you rapport with the universe.

 

Produce great Persons, the rest follows.

Piety and conformity to them that like,
Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like,
I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,
Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!

 

I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning
every one I meet,
Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

 

(With pangs and cries as thine own O bearer of many children,
These clamors wild to a race of pride I give.)

 

O lands, would you be freer than all that has ever been before?
If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen
to me.

 

Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice,
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states
and men.

Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected
materials,
America brings builders, and brings its own styles.
The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and
pass’d to other spheres,
A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

 

America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at
all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
of precedents,
Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced
under their forms,
Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne
from the house,
Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was fittest
for its days,
That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir
who approaches,
And that he shall be fittest for his days.

 

Any period one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

 

These States are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of
the day and night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul
loves,
Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the
soul loves.

Land of lands and bards to corroborate!
Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred
face,
To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d both mother’s and
father‘s,
His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,
Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with
incomparable love,
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in
him,
Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,
Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,
If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he
stretching with them North or South,
Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is
between them,
Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar,
hemlock, live oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood,
orange, magnolia,
Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,
He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with
northern transparent ice,
Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the fish
hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,
His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit, unclosed to good and
evil,
Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present
times,
Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,
Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and
muscle,
The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation
of the Constitution,
The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,
The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and
impregnable,
The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,
hunters, trappers,
Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the
gestation of new States,
Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly
coming up from the uttermost parts,
Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers,
especially the young men,
Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait
they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in
the presence of superiors,
The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness
and decision of their phrenology,
The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when
wrong’d,
The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,
good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,
The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,
The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid
movement of the population,
The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-
digging,
Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all
points,
Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,
Northwest, Southwest,
Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon
the ruins of all the rest,
On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours
be the stake, and respite no more.

(Lo, high toward heaven, this day,
Libertad, from the conqueress’ field return‘d,
I mark the new aureola around your head,
No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,
With war’s flames and the lambent lightnings playing,
And your port immovable where you stand,
With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch’d and lifted
fist,
And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner
utterly crush’d beneath you,
The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his
senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,
The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so
much,
To-day a carrion dead and damn’d, the despised of all the earth,
An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn’d.)

Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever
keeps vista,
Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,
O days of the future I believe in you—I isolate myself for your sake,
O America because you build for mankind I build for you,
O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision
and science,
Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.