Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line,

the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,

The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets, the bringing to bear of the

hooks and ladders and their execution,

The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors

if the fire smoulders under them,

The crowd with their lit faces watching, the glare and dense shadows;

The forger at his forge-furnace and the user of iron after him,

The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and temperer,

The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel and trying the

edge with his thumb,

The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in the socket;

The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,

The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,

The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice,

The Roman lictors preceding the consuls,

The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,

The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted head,

The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and foe

thither,

The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,

The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce

and parley,

The sack of an old city in its time,

The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,

Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,

Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the

gripe of brigands,

Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despairing,

The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,

The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust,

The power of personality just or unjust.

4

Muscle and pluck forever!

What invigorates life invigorates death,

And the dead advance as much as the living advance,

And the future is no more uncertain than the present,

For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the

delicatesse of the earth and of man,

And nothing endures but personal qualities.

What do you think endures?

Do you think a great city endures?

Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the

best built steamships?

Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d’oeuvres of engineering,

forts, armaments?

Away! these are not to be cherish’d for themselves,

They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,

The show passes, all does well enough of course,

All does very well till one flash of defiance.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the

whole world.

5

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d

wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,

Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the

anchor-lifters of the departing,

Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops

selling goods from the rest of the earth,

Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where

money is plentiest,

Nor the place of the most numerous population.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,

Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in

return and understands them,

Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,

Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,

Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,

Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,

Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of

elected persons,

Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of

death pours its sweeping and unript waves,

Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside

authority,

Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President,

Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay,

Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on

themselves,

Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,

Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,

Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;

Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,

Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,

Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,

There the great city stands.

6

How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!

How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a

man’s or woman’s look!

All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears;

A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe,

When he or she appears materials are overaw’d,

The dispute on the soul stops,

The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn’d back, or laid away.

What is your money-making now? what can it do now?

What is your respectability now?

What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now?

Where are your jibes of being now?

Where are your cavils about the soul now?

7

A sterile landscape covers the ore, there is as good as the best for

all the forbidding appearance,

There is the mine, there are the miners,

The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplish’d, the hammersmen

are at hand with their tongs and hammers,

What always served and always serves is at hand.

Than this nothing has better served, it has served all,

Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and long ere the Greek,

Served in building the buildings that last longer than any,

Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient Hindustanee,

Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi, served those whose

relics remain in Central America,

Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn pillars and

the druids,

Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the

snow-cover’d hills of Scandinavia,

Served those who time out of mind made on the granite walls rough

sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean waves,

Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths, served the pastoral

tribes and nomads,

Served the long distant Kelt, served the hardy pirates of the Baltic,

Served before any of those the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,

Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure and the

making of those for war,

Served all great works on land and all great works on the sea,

For the mediaeval ages and before the mediaeval ages,

Served not the living only then as now, but served the dead.

8

I see the European headsman,

He stands mask’d, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong naked arms,

And leans on a ponderous axe.

(Whom have you slaughter’d lately European headsman?

Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?)

I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs,

I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,

Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown’d ladies, impeach’d ministers, rejected kings,

Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the rest.

I see those who in any land have died for the good cause,

The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run out,

(Mind you O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never run out.)