Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;

Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,

Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,

Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,

Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,

Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of

base-ball,

At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license,

bull-dances, drinking, laughter,

At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the

juice through a straw,

At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,

At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;

Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles,

screams, weeps,

Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are

scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,

Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to

the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,

Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,

Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,

Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles

far and near,

Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived

swan is curving and winding,

Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her

near-human laugh,

Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the

high weeds,

Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with

their heads out,

Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,

Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,

Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at

night and feeds upon small crabs,

Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,

Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over

the well,

Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,

Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,

Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the

office or public hall;

Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with

the new and old,

Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,

Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,

Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,

Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher,

impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting;

Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon,

flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,

Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds,

or down a lane or along the beach,

My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;

Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy, (behind me

he rides at the drape of the day,)

Far from the settlements studying the print of animals’ feet, or the

moccasin print,

By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,

Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;

Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,

Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,

Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,

Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,

Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side,

Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,

Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the

diameter of eighty thousand miles,

Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,

Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,

Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,

Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,

I tread day and night such roads.

I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,

And look at quintillions ripen’d and look at quintillions green.

I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,

My course runs below the soundings of plummets.

I help myself to material and immaterial,

No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.

I anchor my ship for a little while only,

My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.

I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a

pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.

I ascend to the foretruck,

I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest,

We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,

Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,

The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is

plain in all directions,

The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my

fancies toward them,

We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to

be engaged,

We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still

feet and caution,

Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city,

The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities

of the globe.

I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,

I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,

I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,

They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drown’d.

I understand the large hearts of heroes,

The courage of present times and all times,

How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the

steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,

How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of

days and faithful of nights,

And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will

not desert you;

How he follow’d with them and tack’d with them three days and

would not give it up,

How he saved the drifting company at last,

How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the

side of their prepared graves,

How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the

sharp-lipp’d unshaved men;

All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,

I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

The disdain and calmness of martyrs,

The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her

children gazing on,

The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,

blowing, cover’d with sweat,

The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous

buckshot and the bullets,

All these I feel or am.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the

ooze of my skin,

I fall on the weeds and stones,

The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,

Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the

wounded person,

My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.