Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

All occupations, duties broad and close,

Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation,

The old, old practical burdens, interests, joys,

The family, parentage, childhood, husband and wife,

The house-comforts, the house itself and all its belongings,

Food and its preservation, chemistry applied to it,

Whatever forms the average, strong, complete, sweet-blooded man or

woman, the perfect longeve personality,

And helps its present life to health and happiness, and shapes its soul,

For the eternal real life to come.

With latest connections, works, the inter-transportation of the world,

Steam-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum,

These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic’s delicate cable,

The Pacific railroad, the Suez canal, the Mont Cenis and Gothard and

Hoosac tunnels, the Brooklyn bridge,

This earth all spann’d with iron rails, with lines of steamships

threading in every sea,

Our own rondure, the current globe I bring.

8

And thou America,

Thy offspring towering e’er so high, yet higher Thee above all towering,

With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law;

Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all,

Thee, ever thee, I sing.

Thou, also thou, a World,

With all thy wide geographies, manifold, different, distant,

Rounded by thee in one — one common orbic language,

One common indivisible destiny for All.

And by the spells which ye vouchsafe to those your ministers in earnest,

I here personify and call my themes, to make them pass before ye.

Behold, America! (and thou, ineffable guest and sister!)

For thee come trooping up thy waters and thy lands;

Behold! thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains,

As in procession coming.

Behold, the sea itself,

And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships;

See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the

green and blue,

See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port,

See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke.

Behold, in Oregon, far in the north and west,

Or in Maine, far in the north and east, thy cheerful axemen,

Wielding all day their axes.

Behold, on the lakes, thy pilots at their wheels, thy oarsmen,

How the ash writhes under those muscular arms!

There by the furnace, and there by the anvil,

Behold thy sturdy blacksmiths swinging their sledges,

Overhand so steady, overhand they turn and fall with joyous clank,

Like a tumult of laughter.

Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents,

Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising,

See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.

Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South,

Thy wealthy daughter-states, Eastern and Western,

The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas,

and the rest,

Thy limitless crops, grass, wheat, sugar, oil, corn, rice, hemp, hops,

Thy barns all fill’d, the endless freight-train and the bulging store-house,

The grapes that ripen on thy vines, the apples in thy orchards,

Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes, thy coal, thy gold

and silver,

The inexhaustible iron in thy mines.

All thine O sacred Union!

Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines,

City and State, North, South, item and aggregate,

We dedicate, dread Mother, all to thee!

Protectress absolute, thou! bulwark of all!

For well we know that while thou givest each and all, (generous as God,)

Without thee neither all nor each, nor land, home,

Nor ship, nor mine, nor any here this day secure,

Nor aught, nor any day secure.

9

And thou, the Emblem waving over all!

Delicate beauty, a word to thee, (it may be salutary,)

Remember thou hast not always been as here to-day so comfortably

ensovereign’d,

In other scenes than these have I observ’d thee flag,

Not quite so trim and whole and freshly blooming in folds of

stainless silk,

But I have seen thee bunting, to tatters torn upon thy splinter’d staff,

Or clutch’d to some young color-bearer’s breast with desperate hands,

Savagely struggled for, for life or death, fought over long,

‘Mid cannons’ thunder-crash and many a curse and groan and yell, and

rifle-volleys cracking sharp,

And moving masses as wild demons surging, and lives as nothing risk’d,

For thy mere remnant grimed with dirt and smoke and sopp’d in blood,

For sake of that, my beauty, and that thou might’st dally as now

secure up there,

Many a good man have I seen go under.

Now here and these and hence in peace, all thine O Flag!

And here and hence for thee, O universal Muse! and thou for them!

And here and hence O Union, all the work and workmen thine!

None separate from thee — henceforth One only, we and thou,

(For the blood of the children, what is it, only the blood maternal?

And lives and works, what are they all at last, except the roads to

faith and death?)

While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for thee, dear Mother,

We own it all and several to-day indissoluble in thee;

Think not our chant, our show, merely for products gross or lucre —

it is for thee, the soul in thee, electric, spiritual!

Our farms, inventions, crops, we own in thee! cities and States in thee!

Our freedom all in thee! our very lives in thee!

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1

A California song,

A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air,

A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing,

A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,

Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.

Farewell my brethren,

Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,

My time has ended, my term has come.

Along the northern coast,

Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,

In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,

With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,

With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,

Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood

forest dense,

I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting.

The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not,

The quick-ear’d teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,

As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to

join the refrain,

But in my soul I plainly heard.

Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,

Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high,

Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,

That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but

the future.

You untold life of me,

And all you venerable and innocent joys,

Perennial hardy life of me with joys ‘mid rain and many a summer sun,

And the white snows and night and the wild winds;

O the great patient rugged joys, my soul’s strong joys unreck’d by man,

(For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,

And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,)

Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,

Our time, our term has come.

Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,

We who have grandly fill’d our time,

With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight,