Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

Of Him I Love Day and Night

Yet, Yet, Ye Downcast Hours

As If a Phantom Caress’d Me

Assurances

Quicksand Years

That Music Always Round Me

What Ship Puzzled at Sea

A Noiseless Patient Spider

O Living Always, Always Dying

To One Shortly to Die

Night on the Prairies

Thought

The Last Invocation

As I Watch the Ploughman Ploughing

Pensive and Faltering

BOOK XXXI

Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood

A Paumanok Picture

BOOK XXXII. FROM NOON TO STARRY NIGHT

Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling

Faces

The Mystic Trumpeter

To a Locomotive in Winter

O Magnet-South

Mannahatta

All Is Truth

A Riddle Song

Excelsior

Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats

Thoughts

Mediums

Weave in, My Hardy Life

Spain, 1873-74

By Broad Potomac’s Shore

From Far Dakota’s Canyons [June 25, 1876]

Old War-Dreams

Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

A Clear Midnight

BOOK XXXIII. SONGS OF PARTING

As the Time Draws Nigh

Years of the Modern

Ashes of Soldiers

Thoughts

Song at Sunset

As at Thy Portals Also Death

My Legacy

Pensive on Her Dead Gazing

Camps of Green

The Sobbing of the Bells [Midnight, Sept. 19-20, 1881]

As They Draw to a Close

Joy, Shipmate, Joy!

The Untold Want

Portals

These Carols

Now Finale to the Shore

So Long!

BOOK XXXIV. SANDS AT SEVENTY

Mannahatta

Paumanok

From Montauk Point

To Those Who’ve Fail’d

A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine

The Bravest Soldiers

A Font of Type

As I Sit Writing Here

My Canary Bird

Queries to My Seventieth Year

The Wallabout Martyrs

The First Dandelion

America

Memories

To-Day and Thee

After the Dazzle of Day

Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809

Out of May’s Shows Selected

Halcyon Days

Election Day, November, 1884

With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

Death of General Grant

Red Jacket (From Aloft)

Washington’s Monument February, 1885

Of That Blithe Throat of Thine

Broadway

To Get the Final Lilt of Songs

Old Salt Kossabone

The Dead Tenor

Continuities

Yonnondio

Life

Going Somewhere

Small the Theme of My Chant

True Conquerors

The United States to Old World Critics

The Calming Thought of All

Thanks in Old Age

Life and Death

The Voice of the Rain

Soon Shall the Winter’s Foil Be Here

While Not the Past Forgetting

The Dying Veteran

Stronger Lessons

A Prairie Sunset

Twenty Years

Orange Buds by Mail from Florida

Twilight

You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me

Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone

The Dead Emperor

As the Greek’s Signal Flame

The Dismantled Ship

Now Precedent Songs, Farewell

An Evening Lull

Old Age’s Lambent Peaks

After the Supper and Talk

BOOK XXXV. GOOD-BYE MY FANCY

Sail out for Good, Eidolon Yacht!

Lingering Last Drops

Good-Bye My Fancy

On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!

MY 71st Year

Apparitions

The Pallid Wreath

An Ended Day

Old Age’s Ship & Crafty Death’s

To the Pending Year

Shakspere-Bacon’s Cipher

Long, Long Hence

Bravo, Paris Exposition!

Interpolation Sounds

To the Sun-Set Breeze

Old Chants

A Christmas Greeting

Sounds of the Winter

A Twilight Song

When the Full-Grown Poet Came

Osceola

A Voice from Death

A Persian Lesson

The Commonplace

The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete

Mirages

L. of G.’s Purport

The Unexpress’d

Grand Is the Seen

Unseen Buds

Good-Bye My Fancy!

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Come, said my soul,

Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)

That should I after return,

Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,

There to some group of mates the chants resuming,

(Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)

Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on,

Ever and ever yet the verses owning — as, first, I here and now

Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,

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One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say

the Form complete is worthier far,

The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,

The Modern Man I sing.

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As I ponder’d in silence,

Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,

A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,

Terrible in beauty, age, and power,

The genius of poets of old lands,

As to me directing like flame its eyes,

With finger pointing to many immortal songs,

And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,

Know’st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?

And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,

The making of perfect soldiers.

Be it so, then I answer’d,

I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,

Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance

and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,

(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the

field the world,

For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,

Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,

I above all promote brave soldiers.

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In cabin’d ships at sea,

The boundless blue on every side expanding,

With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,

Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine,

Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,

She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under

many a star at night,

By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,

In full rapport at last.

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,

Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,

The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,

We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,

The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the

briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,

The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,

The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,

And this is ocean’s poem.

Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,

You not a reminiscence of the land alone,

You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos’d I know not

whither, yet ever full of faith,

Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!

Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it

here in every leaf;)

Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the

imperious waves,

Chant on, sail on, bear o’er the boundless blue from me to every sea,

This song for mariners and all their ships.