Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

he has follow’d the sea,

And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist,

And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them,

No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has

follow’d it,

No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and

sisters there.

The English believe he comes of their English stock,

A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near,

removed from none.

Whoever he looks at in the traveler’s coffee-house claims him,

The Italian or Frenchman is sure, the German is sure, the Spaniard

is sure, and the island Cuban is sure,

The engineer, the deck-hand on the great lakes, or on the Mississippi

or St. Lawrence or Sacramento, or Hudson or Paumanok sound, claims him.

The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood,

The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see

themselves in the ways of him, he strangely transmutes them,

They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown.

2

The indications and tally of time,

Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs,

Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts,

What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company

of singers, and their words,

The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark,

but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark,

The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,

His insight and power encircle things and the human race,

He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.

The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets,

The singers are welcom’d, understood, appear often enough, but rare

has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker

of poems, the Answerer,

(Not every century nor every five centuries has contain’d such a

day, for all its names.)

The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible

names, but the name of each of them is one of the singers,

The name of each is, eye-singer, ear-singer, head-singer,

sweet-singer, night-singer, parlor-singer, love-singer,

weird-singer, or something else.

All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems,

The words of true poems do not merely please,

The true poets are not followers of beauty but the august masters of beauty;

The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers

and fathers,

The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health,

rudeness of body, withdrawnness,

Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems.

The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer,

The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all

these underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer.

The words of the true poems give you more than poems,

They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war,

peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else,

They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,

They do not seek beauty, they are sought,

Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing,

fain, love-sick.

They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,

They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,

Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to

learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless

rings and never be quiet again.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Always our old feuillage!

Always Florida’s green peninsula — always the priceless delta of

Louisiana — always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas,

Always California’s golden hills and hollows, and the silver

mountains of New Mexico — always soft-breath’d Cuba,

Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern sea, inseparable with

the slopes drain’d by the Eastern and Western seas,

The area the eighty-third year of these States, the three and a half

millions of square miles,

The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main,

the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,

The seven millions of distinct families and the same number of dwellings —

always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches,

Always the free range and diversity — always the continent of Democracy;

Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers,

Kanada, the snows;

Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing

the huge oval lakes;

Always the West with strong native persons, the increasing density there,

the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;

All sights, South, North, East — all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,

All characters, movements, growths, a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,

Through Mannahatta’s streets I walking, these things gathering,

On interior rivers by night in the glare of pine knots, steamboats

wooding up,

Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys

of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke

and Delaware,

In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the

hills, or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink,

In a lonesome inlet a sheldrake lost from the flock, sitting on the

water rocking silently,

In farmers’ barns oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done, they

rest standing, they are too tired,

Afar on arctic ice the she-walrus lying drowsily while her cubs play around,

The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail’d, the farthest polar

sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes,

White drift spooning ahead where the ship in the tempest dashes,

On solid land what is done in cities as the bells strike midnight together,

In primitive woods the sounds there also sounding, the howl of the

wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk,

In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead lake, in summer

visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming,

In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black

buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops,

Below, the red cedar festoon’d with tylandria, the pines and

cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat,

Rude boats descending the big Pedee, climbing plants, parasites with

color’d flowers and berries enveloping huge trees,

The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low,

noiselessly waved by the wind,

The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and

the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,

Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding

from troughs,

The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees,

the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising;

Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North

Carolina’s coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the

large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work’d by horses, the

clearing, curing, and packing-houses;

Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the