Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

To you a new bard caroling in the West,

Obeisant sends his love.

(Such led to thee O soul,

All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee,

But now it seems to me sound leads o’er all the rest.)

I hear the annual singing of the children in St. Paul’s cathedral,

Or, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the symphonies,

oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn,

The Creation in billows of godhood laves me.

Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)

Fill me with all the voices of the universe,

Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,

The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,

Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!

6

Then I woke softly,

And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,

And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,

And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,

And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,

And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,

And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,

I said to my silent curious soul out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,

Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,

Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,

Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,

Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,

Haply what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,

Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings nor harsh scream,

Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,

Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers

of harmonies,

Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,

Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-calls of camps,

But to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,

Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night

air, uncaught, unwritten,

Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)

In the Old World the east the Suez canal,

The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,

The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;

Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,

The Past! the Past! the Past!

The Past — the dark unfathom’d retrospect!

The teeming gulf — the sleepers and the shadows!

The past — the infinite greatness of the past!

For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

(As a projectile form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,

So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)

2

Passage O soul to India!

Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.

Not you alone proud truths of the world,

Nor you alone ye facts of modern science,

But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables,

The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,

The deep diving bibles and legends,

The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;

O you temples fairer than lilies pour’d over by the rising sun!

O you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known,

mounting to heaven!

You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d

with gold!

Towers of fables immortal fashion’d from mortal dreams!

You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest!

You too with joy I sing.

Passage to India!

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,

You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,

You, not for trade or transportation only,

But in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul.

3

Passage to India!

Lo soul for thee of tableaus twain,

I see in one the Suez canal initiated, open’d,

I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Engenie’s leading the van,

I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level

sand in the distance,

I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d,

The gigantic dredging machines.

In one again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,)

I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier,

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying

freight and passengers,

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,

I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes,

the buttes,

I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless,

sage-deserts,

I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great

mountains, I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch mountains,

I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest, I pass the

Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas,

I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,

I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,

I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines,

Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold

enchanting mirages of waters and meadows,

Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines,

Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,

Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,

The road between Europe and Asia.

(Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream!

Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,

The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.)

4

Passage to India!

Struggles of many a captain, tales of many a sailor dead,

Over my mood stealing and spreading they come,

Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach’d sky.

Along all history, down the slopes,

As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the surface rising,

A ceaseless thought, a varied train — lo, soul, to thee, thy sight,

they rise,

The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions;

Again Vasco de Gama sails forth,

Again the knowledge gain’d, the mariner’s compass,

Lands found and nations born, thou born America,

For purpose vast, man’s long probation fill’d,

Thou rondure of the world at last accomplish’d.

5

O vast Rondure, swimming in space,

Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty,

Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,

Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,

Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,

With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,

Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.

Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,

Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,

Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,

With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,

With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and

Whither O mocking life?

Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?

Who Justify these restless explorations?