Walt Whitman - The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who

approaches,

And that he shall be fittest for his days.

Any period one nation must lead,

One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

These States are the amplest poem,

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,

Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the

day and night,

Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,

Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves,

Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the

soul loves.

6

Land of lands and bards to corroborate!

Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face,

To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d both mother’s and father’s,

His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,

Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,

Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,

Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with

incomparable love,

Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,

Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,

Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,

Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,

Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,

If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he

stretching with them North or South,

Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between them,

Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock,

live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,

Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,

He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with

northern transparent ice,

Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,

Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the

fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,

His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit, unclosed to good and evil,

Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times,

Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,

Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle,

The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of

the Constitution,

The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,

The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable,

The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,

hunters, trappers,

Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the

gestation of new States,

Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming

up from the uttermost parts,

Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially

the young men,

Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they

have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the

presence of superiors,

The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and

decision of their phrenology,

The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when wrong’d,

The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,

good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,

The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,

The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement

of the population,

The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,

Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points,

Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,

Northwest, Southwest,

Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,

Slavery — the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the

ruins of all the rest,

On and on to the grapple with it — Assassin! then your life or ours

be the stake, and respite no more.

7

(Lo, high toward heaven, this day,

Libertad, from the conqueress’ field return’d,

I mark the new aureola around your head,

No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,

With war’s flames and the lambent lightnings playing,

And your port immovable where you stand,

With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch’d and lifted fist,

And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly

crush’d beneath you,

The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his

senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,

The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much,

To-day a carrion dead and damn’d, the despised of all the earth,

An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn’d.)

8

Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever

keeps vista,

Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,

O days of the future I believe in you — I isolate myself for your sake,

O America because you build for mankind I build for you,

O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision

and science,

Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.

(Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!

But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain,

pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)

9

I listened to the Phantom by Ontario’s shore,

I heard the voice arising demanding bards,

By them all native and grand, by them alone can these States be

fused into the compact organism of a Nation.

To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,

That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle,

as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants.

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most

need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest,

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their

poets shall.

(Soul of love and tongue of fire!

Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world!

Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?)

10

Of these States the poet is the equable man,

Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of

their full returns,

Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,

He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither

more nor less,

He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,

He is the equalizer of his age and land,

He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,

In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich,

thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,

commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,

immortality, government,

In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as

good as the engineer’s, he can make every word he speaks draw blood,

The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith,

He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,)

He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun failing round

helpless thing,

As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,

His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,

In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,