Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

Joy of the plenteous dinner, strong carouse and drinking?

Yet O my soul supreme!

Knowist thou the joys of pensive thought?

Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?

Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering

and the struggle?

The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day

or night?

Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space?

Prophetic joys of better, loftier love’s ideals, the divine wife,

the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade?

Joys all thine own undying one, joys worthy thee O soul.

O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,

To meet life as a powerful conqueror,

No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,

To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving

my interior soul impregnable,

And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

For not life’s joys alone I sing, repeating — the joy of death!

The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments,

for reasons,

Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn’d, or render’d

to powder, or buried,

My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,

My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications,

further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

O to attract by more than attraction!

How it is I know not — yet behold! the something which obeys none

of the rest,

It is offensive, never defensive — yet how magnetic it draws.

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!

To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!

To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!

To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with

perfect nonchalance!

To be indeed a God!

O to sail to sea in a ship!

To leave this steady unendurable land,

To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the

houses,

To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,

To sail and sail and sail!

O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!

To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!

To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,

A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)

A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1

Weapon shapely, naked, wan,

Head from the mother’s bowels drawn,

Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,

Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,

Resting the grass amid and upon,

To be lean’d and to lean on.

Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades,

sights and sounds.

Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music,

Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ.

2

Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind,

Welcome are lands of pine and oak,

Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,

Welcome are lands of gold,

Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the grape,

Welcome are lands of sugar and rice,

Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato and

sweet potato,

Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies,

Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings,

Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming soil of

orchards, flax, honey, hemp;

Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,

Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,

Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores,

Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc,

Lands of iron — lands of the make of the axe.

3

The log at the wood-pile, the axe supported by it,

The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space clear’d for garden,

The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is lull’d,

The walling and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,

The thought of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam ends,

and the cutting away of masts,

The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion’d houses and barns,

The remember’d print or narrative, the voyage at a venture of men,

families, goods,

The disembarkation, the founding of a new city,

The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it, the outset

anywhere,

The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa, Willamette,

The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddle-bags;

The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons,

The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men with their clear untrimm’d faces,

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves,

The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the boundless

impatience of restraint,

The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types, the

solidification;

The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard schooners and

sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,

Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods, stripes of

snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,

The glad clear sound of one’s own voice, the merry song, the natural

life of the woods, the strong day’s work,

The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the

bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-skin;

The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,

The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,

The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them

regular,

Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they

were prepared,

The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their

curv’d limbs,

Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on by

posts and braces,

The hook’d arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,

The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail’d,

Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,

The echoes resounding through the vacant building:

The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,

The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully

bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam,

The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands rapidly

laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear,

The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the

trowels striking the bricks,

The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its place,

and set with a knock of the trowel-handle,

The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the

steady replenishing by the hod-men;

Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices,

The swing of their axes on the square-hew’d log shaping it toward

the shape of a mast,

The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,

The butter-color’d chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,

The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes,

The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats,

stays against the sea;

The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the

close-pack’d square,

The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring,