Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (77 page)

You tides with ceaseless swell! you power that does this work!
You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space’s spread,
Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations,
What are the messages by you from distant stars to us? what
Sirius‘? what Capella’s?
What central heart—and you the pulse—vivifies all? what
boundless aggregate of all?
What subtle indirection and significance in you? what clue to all
in you? what fluid, vast identity,
Holding the universe with all its parts as one—as sailing in a ship?

Last of ebb, and daylight waning,
Scented sea-cool landward making, smells of sedge and salt
incoming,
With many a half-caught voice sent up from the eddies,
Many a muffled confession—many a sob and whisper’d word,
As of speakers far or hid.
How they sweep down and out! how they mutter!
Poets unnamed—artists greatest of any, with cherish’d lost designs,
Love’s unresponse—a chorus of age’s complaints—hope’s last words,
Some suicide’s despairing cry,
Away to the boundless waste, and
never again return.

 

On to oblivion then!
On, on, and do your part, ye burying, ebbing tide!
On for your time, ye furious debouché!

And yet not you alone, twilight and burying ebb,
Nor you, ye lost designs alone—nor failures, aspirations;
I know, divine deceitful ones, your glamour’s seeming;
Duly by you, from you, the tide and light again—duly the hinges
turning,
Duly the needed discord-parts offsetting, blending,
Weaving from you, from Sleep, Night, Death itself,
The rhythmus of Birth eternal.

Proudly the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, advancing,
Long it holds at the high, with bosom broad outswelling,
All throbs, dilates—the farms, woods, streets of cities—workmen
at work,
Mainsails, topsails, jibs, appear in the offing—steamers’ pennants
of smoke—and under the forenoon sun
Freighted with human lives, gaily the outward bound, gaily the
inward bound,
Flaunting from many a spar the flag I love.

By that long scan of waves, myself call’d back, resumed upon
myself,
In every crest some undulating light or shade—some retrospect,
Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas—scenes ephemeral,
The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the wounded and
the dead,
Myself through every by-gone phase—my idle youth—old age at
hand,
My three-score years of life summ’d up, and more, and past,
By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing,
And haply yet some drop within God’s scheme’s ensemble—some
wave, or part of wave,
Like one of yours, ye multitudinous ocean.

Then last of all, caught from these shores, this hill,
Of you O tides, the mystic human meaning:
Only by law of you, your swell and ebb, enclosing me the same,
The brain that shapes, the voice that chants this song.

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest
scene and show,
‘Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-
loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—
nor Mississippi’s stream:
—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—
the
still small voice
vibrating—America’s choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—
Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia,
California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and
conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the
peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
-Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the
heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington‘s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the
sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos’d hurricanes,
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears—a lack from all
eternity in thy content,
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make
thee greatest—no less could make thee,)
Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek‘st and seek’st, yet
never gain‘st,
Surely some right withheld—some voice, in huge monotonous
rage, of freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those
breakers,
By lengthen’d swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
And undertones of distant lion roar,
(Sounding, appealing to the sky’s deaf ear—but now, rapport for
once,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
The first and last confession of the globe,
Outsurging, muttering from thy soul’s abysms,
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.

As one by one withdraw the lofty actors,
From that great play on history’s stage eterne,
That lurid, partial act of war and peace—of old and new
contending,
Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long
suspense;
All past—and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing,
Victor’s and vanquish‘d—Lincoln’s and Lee’s—now thou with
them,
Man of the mighty days—and equal to the days!
Thou from the prairies!—tangled and many-vein’d and hard has
been thy part,
To admiration has it been enacted!

Upon this scene, this show,
Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
(Nor in caprice alone—some grains of deepest meaning,)
Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes,
As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill’d with its soul,
Product of Nature’s sun, stars, earth direct—a towering human
form,
In hunting-shirt of film, arm’d with the rifle, a half-ironical smile
curving its phantom lips,
Like one of Ossian’s ghosts looks down.

Ah, not this marble, dead and cold:
Far from its base and shaft expanding—the round zones circling,
comprehending,
Thou, Washington, art all the world‘s, the continents’ entire—not
yours alone, America,
Europe’s as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer’s cot,
Or frozen North, or sultry South—the African’s—the Arab’s in his
tent,
Old Asia’s there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;
(Greets the antique the hero new? ‘tis but the same—the heir
legitimate, continued ever,
The indomitable heart and arm—proofs of the never-broken
line,
Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same—e’en in defeat
defeated not, the same:)
Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night,
Through teeming cities’ streets, indoors or out, factories or
farms,
Now, or to come, or past—where patriot wills existed or exist,
Wherever Freedom, pois’d by Toleration, sway’d by Law,
Stands or is rising thy true monument.

Of that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank,
I’ll mind the lesson, solitary bird—let me too welcome chilling
drifts,
E‘en the profoundest chill, as now—a torpid pulse, a brain
unnerv’d,
Old age land-lock’d within its winter bay—(cold, cold, O cold!)
These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet,
For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last;
Not summer’s zones alone—not chants of youth, or south’s warm
tides alone,
But held by sluggish floes, pack’d in the northern ice, the
cumulus of years,
These with gay heart I also sing.

What hurrying human tides, or day or night!
What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!
What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee!
What curious questioning glances—glints of love!
Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration!
Thou portal—thou arena—thou of the myriad long-drawn lines
and groups!
(Could but thy flagstones, curbs, façades, tell their inimitable
tales;
Thy windows rich, and huge hotels—thy side-walks wide;)
Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
Thou, like the parti-colored world itself—like infinite, teeming,
mocking life!
Thou visor‘d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!

To get the final lilt of songs,
To penetrate the inmost lore of poets—to know the mighty ones,
Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Tennyson, Emerson;
To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and
doubt—to truly understand,
To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,
Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.

Far back, related on my mother’s side,
Old Salt Kossabone, I’ll tell you how he died:
(Had been a sailor all his life—was nearly 90—lived with his
married grandchild, Jenny;
House on a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and
stretch to open sea;)
The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his
regular custom,
In his great arm chair by the window seated,
(Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)
Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to
himself—And now the close of all:
One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long—cross-
tides and much wrong going,
At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck
veering,
And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly
entering, cleaving, as he watches,
“She’s free—she’s on her destination”—these the last words—
when Jenny came, he sat there dead,
Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother’s side, far back.

As down the stage again,
With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable,
Back from the fading lessons of the past, I’d call, I’d tell and
own,
How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from
thee!
(So firm—so liquid-soft—again that tremulous, manly timbre!
The perfect singing voice—deepest of all to me the lesson—trial
and test of all:)
How through those strains distili‘d—how the rapt ears, the soul of
me, absorbing
Fernando’s
heart
, Manrico’s passionate call, Ernani’s,
sweet
Gennaro‘s,
I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants
transmuting,
Freedom’s and Love’s and Faith’s unloos’d cantabile,
(As perfume’s, color‘s, sunlight’s correlation:)
From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor,
A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel’d
earth,
To memory of thee.

[From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist.]

 

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier
fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons
continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge,
Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,
To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;
Yonnondio—I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine, with
plains and mountains dark,
I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,
As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
twilight,
(Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the
air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man;
(Have former armies fail’d? then we send fresh armies—and fresh
again;)
Ever the grappled mystery of all earth’s ages old or new;
Ever the eager eyes, hurrahs, the welcome-clapping hands, the
loud applause;
Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;
Struggling to-day the same—battling the same.

My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend,
(Now buried in an English grave—and this a memory-leaf for her
dear sake,)
Ended our talk—“The sum, concluding all we know of old or
modern learning, intuitions deep,
”Of all Geologies—Histories—of all Astronomy—of Evolution,
Metaphysics all,
“Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely
bettering,
”Life, life an endless march, an endless army, (no halt, but it is
duly over,)
“The world, the race, the soul—in space and time the universes,
”All bound as is befitting each—all surely going somewhere.“