Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (80 page)

 

Welcome, Brazilian brother—thy ample place is ready;
A loving hand—a smile from the north—a sunny instant hail!
(Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,
impedimentas,
Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the acceptance
and the faith;)
To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck—to thee from
us the expectant eye,
Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning well,
The true lesson of a nation’s light in the sky,
(More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,)
The height to be superb humanity.

Sounds of the winter too,
Sunshine upon the mountains—many a distant strain
From cheery railroad train—from nearer field, barn, house,
The whispering air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn,
Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of
flail,
An old man’s garrulous lips among the rest,
Think not we give out
yet,
Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.

As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame,
Musing on long-pass’d war scenes—of the countless buried
unknown soldiers,
Of the vacant names, as unindented air’s and sea‘s—the
unreturn’d,
The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the
deep-fill’d trenches
Of gather’d dead from all America, North, South, East, West,
whence they came up,
From wooded Maine, New-England’s farms, from fertile
Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio,
From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the Carolinas,
Texas,
(Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights in the noiseless
flickering flames,
Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising-I hear the
rhythmic tramp of the armies;)
You million unwrit names all, all—you dark bequest from all the
war,
A special verse for you—a flash of duty long neglected—your
mystic roll strangely gather’d here,
Each name recall’d by me from out the darkness and death’s
ashes,
Henceforth to be, deep, deep within my heart recording, for
many a future year,
Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or
South,
Embalm’d with love in this twilight song.

When the full-grown poet came,
Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its
shows of day and night,) saying,
He is mine;
But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and
unreconciled,
Nay, he is mine alone;
—Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each
by the hand;
And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding
hands,
Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,
And wholly and joyously blends them.

When his hour for death had come,
He slowly rais’d himself from the bed on the floor,
Drew on his war-dress, shirt, leggings, and girdled the belt around
his waist,
Call’d for vermilion paint (his looking-glass was held before him,)
Painted half his face and neck, his wrists, and back-hands.
Put the scalp-knife carefully in his belt—then lying down, resting
a moment,
Rose again, half sitting, smiled, gave in silence his extended hand
to each and all,
Sank faintly low to the floor (tightly grasping the tomahawk
handle,)
Fix’d his look on wife and little children—the last:

 

 

(And here a line in memory of his name and death.)

 

A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and
power,
With sudden, indescribable blow—towns drown‘d—humanity by
thousands slain,
The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron
bridge,
Dash’d pell-mell by the blow—yet usher’d life continuing on,
(Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling, wild debris,
A suffering woman saved—a baby safely born!)

 

Although I come and unannounc‘d, in horror and in pang,
In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale elemental crash, (this
voice so solemn, strange,)
I too a minister of Deity.

 

Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
We mourn the old, the young untimely drawn to thee,
The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
The household wreck‘d, the husband and the wife the engulf’d
forger in his forge,
The corpses in the whelming waters and the mud,
The gather’d thousands to their funeral mounds, and thousands
never found or gather’d.

 

Then after burying, mourning the dead,
(Faithful to them found or unfound, forgetting not, bearing the
past, here new musing,)
A day—a passing moment or an hour—America itself bends
low,
Silent, resign‘d, submissive.

 

War, death, cataclysm like this, America,
Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart.
E‘en as I chant, lo! out of death, and out of ooze and slime,
The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy, help, love,
From West and East, from South and North and over sea,
Its hot-spurr’d hearts and hands humanity to human aid moves on;
And from within a thought and lesson yet.

 

Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air!
Thou waters that encompass us!
Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep!
Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all,
incessant!
Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless,
calm,
Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
How ill to e‘er forget thee!

 

For I too have forgotten,
(Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
wealth, inventions, civilization,)
Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
mighty, elemental throes,
In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy’d.

For his o‘erarching and last lesson the graybeard sufi,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

 

“Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,
Allah is all, all, all—is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah,
Allah is there.
”Has the estray wander’d far? Is the reason-why strangely
hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every
life;
The something never still‘d—never entirely gone? the invisible
need of every seed?

 

“It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception.”

The commonplace I sing;
How cheap is health! how cheap nobility!
Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;
The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,
(Take here the mainest lesson—less from books—less from the
schools,)
The common day and night—the common earth and waters,
Your farm—your work, trade, occupation,
The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all.

The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas‘d,
The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage,
The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant,
Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the
dissolute;
(What is the part the wicked and the loathesome bear within
earth’s orbic scheme?)
Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot.

 

More experiences and sights, stranger, than you’d think for;
Times again, now mostly just after sunrise or before
sunset,
Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear weather,
in plain sight,
Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the shop
fronts,
(Account for it or not—credit or not—it is all true,
And my mate there could tell you the like—we have often
confab’d about it,)
People and scenes, animals, trees, colors and lines, plain as
could be,
Farms and dooryards of home, paths border’d with box, lilacs in
corners,
Weddings in churches, thanksgiving dinners, returns of long-
absent sons,
Glum funerals, the crape-veil’d mother and the daughters,
Trials in courts, jury and judge, the accused in the box,
Contestants, battles, crowds, bridges, wharves,
Now and then mark’d faces of sorrow or joy,
(I could pick them out this moment if I saw them again,)
Show’d to me just aloft to the right in the sky-edge,
Or plainly there to the left on the hill-tops.

Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their
formidable masses (even to expose them,)
But add, fuse, complete, extend—and celebrate the immortal and
the good.

 

Haughty this song, its words and scope,
To span vast realms of space and time,
Evolution—the cumulative—growths and generations.

 

Begun in ripen’d youth and steadily pursued,
Wandering, peering, dallying with all—war, peace, day and night
absorbing,
Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,
I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.

 

I sing of life, yet mind me well of death:
To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has
for years—
Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.

How dare one say it?
After the cycles, poems, singers, plays,
Vaunted Ionia‘s, India’s—Homer, Shakspere—the long, long
times’ thick dotted roads, areas,
The shining clusters and the Milky Ways of stars—Nature’s pulses
reap‘d,
All retrospective passions, heroes, war, love, adoration,
All ages’ plummets dropt to their utmost depths,
All human lives, throats, wishes, brains—all experiences’ utterance;
After the countless songs, or long or short, all tongues, all lands,
Still something not yet told in poesy’s voice or print—something
lacking,
(Who knows? the best yet unexpress’d and lacking.)

Grand is the seen, the light, to me—grand are the sky
and stars,
Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space,
And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary;
But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending,
endowing all those,
Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing
the sea,
(What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what
amount without thee?)
More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul!
More multiform far—more lasting thou than they.

Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well,
Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or
cubic inch,
Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn,
Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping;
Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them
waiting,
(On earth and in the sea—the universe—the stars there in the
heavens,)
Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless,
And waiting ever more, forever more behind.

Good-bye my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I’m going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Good-bye my Fancy.
Now for my last—let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

 

Long have we lived, joy‘d, caress’d together;
Delightful!—now separation—Good-bye my Fancy.
Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter’d, become really blended
into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we’ll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we’ll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we’ll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs,
(who knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning—so now
finally,
Good-bye—and hail! my Fancy.

A BACKWARD GLANCE O‘ER TRAVEL’D ROADS
¹³¹