Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?

When shows break up what but One’s-Self is sure?

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That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long

untaught I did not hear,

But now the chorus I hear and am elated,

A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of

daybreak I hear,

A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,

A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,

The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and

violins, all these I fill myself with,

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite

meanings,

I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving,

contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;

I do not think the performers know themselves — but now I think

begin to know them.

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What ship puzzled at sea, cons for the true reckoning?

Or coming in, to avoid the bars and follow the channel a perfect

pilot needs?

Here, sailor! here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot,

Whom, in a little boat, putting off and rowing, I hailing you offer.

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A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to

connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

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O living always, always dying!

O the burials of me past and present,

O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;

O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)

O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and

look at where I cast them,

To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.

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From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,

You are to die — let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate,

I am exact and merciless, but I love you — there is no escape for you.

Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you ‘ust feel it,

I do not argue, I bend my head close and half envelop it,

I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,

I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,

I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is

eternal, you yourself will surely escape,

The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,

Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,

You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,

You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,

I am with you,

I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,

I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

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Night on the prairies,

The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,

The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;

I walk by myself — I stand and look at the stars, which I think now

never realized before.

Now I absorb immortality and peace,

I admire death and test propositions.

How plenteous! how spiritual! how resume!

The same old man and soul — the same old aspirations, and the same content.

I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,

I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless

around me myriads of other globes.

Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will

measure myself by them,

And now touch’d with the lives of other globes arrived as far along

as those of the earth,

Or waiting to arrive, or pass’d on farther than those of the earth,

I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,

Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.

O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,

I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

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As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing,

To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a

wreck at sea,

Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and

wafted kisses, and that is the last of them,

Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President,

Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder’d

off the Northeast coast and going down — of the steamship Arctic

going down,

Of the veil’d tableau-women gather’d together on deck, pale, heroic,

waiting the moment that draws so close — O the moment!

A huge sob — a few bubbles — the white foam spirting up — and then the

women gone,

Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on — and I now

pondering, Are those women indeed gone?

Are souls drown’d and destroy’d so?

Is only matter triumphant?

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At the last, tenderly,

From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,

From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,

Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;

With the key of softness unlock the locks — with a whisper,

Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly — be not impatient,

(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,

Strong is your hold O love.)

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As I watch’d the ploughman ploughing,

Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,

I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;

(Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)

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Pensive and faltering,

The words the Dead I write,

For living are the Dead,

(Haply the only living, only real,

And I the apparition, I the spectre.)

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1

Thou Mother with thy equal brood,

Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity only,

A special song before I go I’d sing o’er all the rest,

For thee, the future.

I’d sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality,

I’d fashion thy ensemble including body and soul,

I’d show away ahead thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish’d.

The paths to the house I seek to make,

But leave to those to come the house itself.

Belief I sing, and preparation;

As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the present only,

But greater still from what is yet to come,