Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,

Countless masses debouch upon them,

They are now cover’d with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.

See, projected through time,

For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop,

Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,

One generation playing its part and passing on,

Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,

With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me to listen,

With eyes retrospective towards me.

3

Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian!

Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!

For you a programme of chants.

Chants of the prairies,

Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea,

Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota,

Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and thence equidistant,

Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.

4

Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,

Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring,

Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,

And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect

lovingly with you.

I conn’d old times,

I sat studying at the feet of the great masters,

Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.

In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique?

Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.

5

Dead poets, philosophs, priests,

Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,

Language-shapers on other shores,

Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,

I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left

wafted hither,

I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)

Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more

than it deserves,

Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,

I stand in my place with my own day here.

Here lands female and male,

Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of

materials,

Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow’d,

The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms,

The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing,

Yes here comes my mistress the soul.

6

The soul,

Forever and forever — longer than soil is brown and solid — longer

than water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the

most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and

of immortality.

I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any

circumstances be subjected to another State,

And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by

night between all the States, and between any two of them,

And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of

weapons with menacing points,

And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces;

And a song make I of the One form’d out of all,

The fang’d and glittering One whose head is over all,

Resolute warlike One including and over all,

(However high the head of any else that head is over all.)

I will acknowledge contemporary lands,

I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously

every city large and small,

And employments! I will put in my poems that with you is heroism

upon land and sea,

And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.

I will sing the song of companionship,

I will show what alone must finally compact these,

I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love,

indicating it in me,

I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were

threatening to consume me,

I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires,

I will give them complete abandonment,

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,

For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy?

And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

7

I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,

I advance from the people in their own spirit,

Here is what sings unrestricted faith.

Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may,

I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also,

I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is — and I say

there is in fact no evil,

(Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land or

to me, as any thing else.)

I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion, I

descend into the arena,

(It may be I am destin’d to utter the loudest cries there, the

winner’s pealing shouts,

Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above every thing.)

Each is not for its own sake,

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,

None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough,

None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain

the future is.

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be

their religion,

Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur;

(Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,

Nor land nor man or woman without religion.)

8

What are you doing young man?

Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?

These ostensible realities, politics, points?

Your ambition or business whatever it may be?

It is well — against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,

But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion’s sake,

For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential

life of the earth,

Any more than such are to religion.

9

What do you seek so pensive and silent?

What do you need camerado?

Dear son do you think it is love?

Listen dear son — listen America, daughter or son,

It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it

satisfies, it is great,

But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,

It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and

provides for all.

10

Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,

The following chants each for its kind I sing.

My comrade!

For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising

inclusive and more resplendent,

The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.

Melange mine own, the unseen and the seen,

Mysterious ocean where the streams empty,

Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me,

Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we

know not of,

Contact daily and hourly that will not release me,

These selecting, these in hints demanded of me.

Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me,

Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,

Any more than I am held to the heavens and all the spiritual world,

After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.

O such themes — equalities! O divine average!

Warblings under the sun, usher’d as now, or at noon, or setting,