Whitman biography video

Books

Leaves of Grass.

THE POEMS

OF

WALT WHITMAN

[SELECTED]

WITH INTRODUCTION

BY ERNEST RHYS.

LONDON:
Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane Paternoster Row,
AND NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

CONTENTS.
___________

	PAGE		PAGE
INSCRIPTIONS&#;		STARTING FROM PAUMANOK	11
To Foreign Lands	1
To Thee Old Cause	1	CALAMUS&#;
One's-self I Sing	2	In Paths Untrodden	27
As I Ponder'd in Silence	3	For You O Democracy	28
In Cabin'd Ships at Sea	3	These I Singing in Spring	28
To a Historian	5	Of the Terrible Doubt of
When I Read the Book	5	Appearances	30
Beginning my Studies	5	The Base of all Meta-
Beginners	6	physics	31
Me Imperturbe	6	Recorders Ages Hence	32
The Ship Starting	7	When I heard at the close
I Hear America Singing	7	of the Day	33
What Place is Besieged?	8	Are You the new Person
Still Though the One I		drawn toward me?	34
Sing	8	Roots and Leaves them-
Shut not Your Doors	9	selves alone	34
Poets to Come	9	I Saw in Louisiana a live-
To You	10	oak growing	35
Thou Reader	10	To A Stranger	36

	PAGE		PAGE
This moment yearning		Youth, Day, Old Age and
and thoughtful	36	Night	97
I hear it was charged
against me	37
The Prairie-grass divid-		BIRDS OF PASSAGE&#;
ing	37	Song of the Universal	98
When I peruse the Con-		Pioneers! O Pioneers!
quer'd Fame	38	To You
No Labour-saving Ma-		France
chine	38	Myself and Mine
A Glimpse	39	With Antecedents
What think you I take
my Pen in hand?	39
A Leaf for Hand in Hand	40	SEA-DRIFT&#;
I Dream'd in a Dream	40	Out of the Cradle End-
Sometimes with one I		lessly Rocking
Love	40	As I Ebb'd With the
To the East and to the		Ocean of Life
West	41	To the Man-of-War-Bird
Fast anchor'd eternal O		Aboard at a Ship's Helm
Love!	41	On the Beach at Night
Among the Multitude	41	The World Below the
O You whom I often and		Brine
Silently Come	42	On the Beach at Night
Full of Life Now	42	Alone
That Shadow my Like-		Song for all Seas, all
ness	43	Ships
		Patrolling Barnegat
SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD	44	After the Sea-Ship

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry	57
Song of the Answerer	64	BY THE ROADSIDE&#;
A Song of Joys	69	A Boston Ballad
Song of the Broad-Axe	78	Europe
Song of the Redwood-		When I heard the Learn'd
Tree	91	Astronomer

	PAGE		PAGE
O Me! O Life!		An Army Corps on the
I Sit and Look Out		March
To Rich Givers		By the Bivouac's Fitful
The Dalliance of the		Flame
Eagles		Come Up From the Fields
Roaming in Thought		Father
A Farm Picture		Vigil Strange I Kept on
A Child's Amaze		the Field one Night
The Runner		A March in the Ranks
Thought		Hard-Prest, and the
Thought		Road Unknown
Gliding O'er All		A Sight in Camp in the
Has Never Come to Thee		Daybreak grey and dim
an Hour		As Toilsome I Wander'd
Beautiful Women		Virginia's Woods
Mother and Babe		Not the Pilot
Thought		Year that Trembled and
To Old Age		Reel'd Beneath Me
		The Wound-Dresser
		Long, too Long America
DRUM-TAPS&#;		Give Me the Splendid
First O Songs for a		Silent Sun
Prelude		Dirge For Two Veterans
Eighteen Sixty-one		Over the Carnage rose
Beat! Beat! Drums!		Prophetic a Voice
From Paumanok Starting		I Saw Old General at
I Fly like a Bird		Bay
Song of the Banner at		The Artilleryman's Vision
Daybreak		Ethiopia Saluting the
Rise O Days from your		Colours
Fathomless Deeps		Not Youth Pertains to
Virginia&#;the West		Me
City of Ships		Race of Veterans
Cavalry Crossing a Ford		O Tan-faced Prairie-Boy
Bivouac on a Mountain		Look Down Fair Moon
Side		Reconciliation

	PAGE		PAGE
How Solemn as One by		The City Dead-House
One		This Compost
As I Lay with My Head		To a Foil'd European
in Your Lap Camerado		Revolutionaire
Delicate Cluster		Unnamed Lands
To a Certain Civilian		Song of Prudence
Lo, Victress on the Peaks		Warble for Lilac-Time
Spirit whose Work is		Voices
Done		Miracles
Adieu to a Soldier		Sparkles from the Wheel
Turn O Libertad		To A Pupil
To the Leaven'd Soul		Unfolded Out of the
they Trod		Folds
		Kosmos
		Who Learns My Lesson
MEMORIES OF PRESIDENT		Complete?
LINCOLN&#;		Tests
When Lilacs Last in the		The Torch
Dooryard Bloom'd		O Star of France
O Captain! my Captain!		An Old Man's Thought
Hush'd be the Camps to-		of School
day		My Picture-Gallery
This Dust was once the		With All Thy Gifts
Man		Wandering at Morn
		The Prairie States
BY BLUE ONTARIO'S
SHORE		PROUND MUSIC OF THE
		STORM
AUTUMN RIVULETS&#;
As Consequent from Store		Prayer of Columbus
of Summer Rains		To Think of Time
The Return of the Heroes
There Was a Child Went		WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY
Forth		DEATH&#;
Old Ireland		Darest Thou Now O Soul

	PAGE		PAGE
Whispers of Heavenly		Old War-Dreams
Death		What Best I See in Thee
Yet, Yet, ye Downcast		Thick-Sprinkled Bunting
Hours		As I Walk these Broad
As if a Phantom Caress'd		Majestic Days
Me		A Clear Midnight
Assurances
Quicksand Years		SONGS OF PARTING&#;
The Last Invocation		As the Time Draws Nigh
As I Watch'd the Plough-		Years of the Modern
man Ploughing		Ashes of Soldiers
A Thought		Thoughts
Pensive and Faltering		Song at Sunset
Thou Mother with thy		As at thy Portals also
Equal Brood		Death
		My Legacy
		Pensive on her Dead
FROM NOON TO STARRY		Gazing
NIGHT&#;		Camps of Green
Thou Orb Aloft Full-		The Sobbing of the Bells
Dazzling		As they Draw to a Close
O Magnet-South		Joy, Shipmate, Joy!
Mannahatta		The Untold Want
A Riddle Song		Now Finalè to the Shore
Excelsior		So Long!

WHEN the true poet comes, how shall we know him&#;

By what clear token,&#;manners, language, dress?
Or shall a voice from Heaven speak and show him:

Him the swift healer of the Earth's distress!
Tell us that when the long-expected comes

At last, with mirth and melody and singing,
We him may greet with banners, beat of drums,

Welcome of men and maids, and joy-bells ringing;

And, for this poet of ours,

Laurels and flowers.

Thus shall ye know him&#;this shall be his token:

Manners like other men, an unstrange gear;
His speech not musical, but harsh and broken

Shall sound at first, each line a driven spear;
For he shall sing as in the centuries olden,

Before mankind its earliest fire forgot;
Yet whoso listens long hears music golden.

How shall ye know him? ye shall know him not

Till ended hate and scorn,

To the grave he's borne.

&#;RICHARD WATSON GILDER.

The Century Magazine,

November

Walt Whitman.
___________

"Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there

beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the

lesson,

Pioneers! O Pioneers!"

LONG ago were tenderly bequeathed
by the greatest spirit who ever
moved on earth&#;and, may we
not say, the greatest poet?&#;an
obscure young man of divine
presence, whose soul was as a
clear flame of truth in a dark
and haunted night, two precepts to his disciples.
The first of the two, understood amiss, travestied
by men to inglorious ends of caste and worldly
advancement, was fatally separated from its fellow
more and more in the after theories of religion. The
second, which, in use, has been so grandly named
the Golden Rule, though always potent for love and
human fellowship, has in the perfect meaning the

Christ gave to it been often sorrowfully lost to us.
All along it has, like its fellow, been in its full purity
more of the sacred instinct of the few pure hearts
than of the many. But now, more than ever,
in the surge and fret of later time, when its need
is inestimably greater, its spirit seems often lost
and perverted, while the letter of its tradition is
being told and retold with unlimited unction. To
restore this spirit to heroic and active influence
among men were a poet's work worthy of the
highest, and it is this which is the most immediate
significance of the "task eternal, and the burden
and the lesson," which Walt Whitman has taken up,
&#;this, perhaps, the most dominant aspect for us in
England to-day of Walt Whitman's work as a poet.

In point of pure humanity, then, this new song
of America is most significant for us. But if stress
is laid on Leaves of Grass as a new poetry of
love and comradeship at this time of social mis-
giving, when rich and poor alike make us keenly
feel the need of the spirit of human love, the poetic
force and quality Walt Whitman brings to aid him
in his task must not be overlooked. It is not senti-
mental valley of the rose and nightingale,&#;no
moonlit dreamland of romance,&#;whence he draws
his inspiration. His poems, whatever critics may
say of their art-form and harmonies, are touched
with a wider spirit, and in their sweeping music
take in the whole scope of Time and Space open
to the modern mind. So, if the command was
laid upon Walt Whitman to sing "the life-long love
of comrades," which is the song of the new Demo-
cracy, it was his, too, to first essay the vaster

harmony still of the far-stretched universe as
modernly known. The conjunction of this greatness
of poetic vision, fearlessly equal to the far range of
later science, with the most intimate sympathy with
the individual human heart, is what makes Whitman
so powerfully suggestive to the younger minds of
to-day. In his hopeful gaze into the future, the
doubts and misgivings of the time are laid at rest;
as he sings of the new, purer Democracy, the social
distempers and miseries of this particular hour lose
their finality of woe, and are seen to be but a passing
stride in the eternal human march.

"One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
. . . . . . .

Of life immense in passion, pulse and power,

Cheerful, for freest action, form'd under the laws divine,

The Modern Man I sing."

The Modern Man! whom most of us are afraid to
approach in poetry, or from any high standpoint at
all,&#;Walt Whitman has resolutely faced him, and
sounded the hopes and fears of his potential being.
The foregoing passage from "Inscriptions," poems
introductory to the main body of the Leaves of
Grass, may be called indeed the key-note of Walt
Whitman's unusual music. Struck thus at the
outset, it will be found dominant throughout the
book; with it sounding insistently in our ears we
shall not be likely to mistake the great intention of
this new poetry.

The best way to approach a poet is through his
personality; it is only true poets who can bear to
be so approached. In attempting to get at the

bearing upon our day and generation of Walt
Whitman as a poet, we must first of all make friends
with him as a man, for soon it is found that his life
and personality are absolutely one with his poetry.
It is impossible, indeed, to thoroughly apprehend the
Leaves of Grass without knowing and being thrilled
by the magnetic individuality that informs them
throughout. And Walt Whitman has not stinted
the American people of opportunity to see and
know him familiarly; his life has been a remark-
ably open and undisguised one from the first.
Visiting him now in his quiet home in Camden,
New Jersey, one would find a white-haired vener-
able man of sixty-six, but it is the Walt Whitman of
thirty years back whom one must realise, as he
was when, in his prime of manhood and poetic
power, he began to write the Leaves of Grass:&#;

"I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease no till death."

Judged by the conventional good-society standard
of appearance, it is to be feared that Walt Whit-
man would have then seemed an alarmingly
natural sort of being, just as his poetry judged
by approved rhymster's rules seems particularly
audacious. There is a description by W. D.
O'Connor, written ten years later it is true, but
which will help us to realise his presence better
perhaps than anything else. It is to be found in
O'Connor's well-known essay, "The Good Gray
Poet":&#;

"For years past thousands of people in New York, in
Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in Wash-
ington, have seen, even as I saw two hours ago, tallying,

WALT WHITMAN.

xiii

one might say, the streets of our American cities, and fit to
have for his background and accessories their streaming
populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking
masculine beauty&#;a poet&#;powerful and venerable in
appearance; large, calm, superbly formed; oftenest clad in
the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the
common people; resembling and generally taken by
strangers for some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman,
or grand labourer of one kind or another; and passing
slowly in this guise, with nochalant and haughty step
along the pavement, with the sunlight and shadows falling
around him. The dark sombrero he usually wear was,
when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the
moment in his hand; rich light an artist would have chosen
lay upon his uncovered head, majestic, large, Homeric, and
set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient
sculpture. I marked the countenence, serene, proud, cheer-
ful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles;
the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes;
the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that fulness of
arch seldom seen save in the antique busts; the flowing hair
and fleecy beard, both very grey, and tempering with a look
of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the
simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but
spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and
exhaling faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with
manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing in its perfect
health and vigour, the august charm of the strong."

This depicture of Walt Whitman is valuable as
being a direct portrayal, taken on the spot as it were,
and showing the magnetic effect of his personal
presence, affecting those who came in contact with
him to an extraordinary degree, so that indeed it
may be that they became poets in their turn,
and somewhat idealistic in their accounts. Dr.
Maurice Bucke in his vivid book upon Whitman tells

of a certain young man who went to see the poet&#;
being already familiar with Leaves of Grass&#;and
who by means of only a casual and ordinary talk
was filled with a strange physical and spiritual
exaltation, which lasted some weeks; what is
still more impressive, however, it is added that the
young fellow's whole tenour of life was altered by
this slight contact,&#;and that his character, outer
life, and entire spiritual being were elevated and
purified in a very remarkable way. This might seem
exaggerated, but this special amount is attested
beyond the suspicion even of exaggeration, and it
is typical, it will be found, of Walt Whitman's native
influence and stimulus throughout. We have the
direct testimony of many men of genius to prove
this. From the involuntary tribute of Abraham
Lincoln,&#;"Well, he looks like a Man!"&#;to the
more conscious homage of John Burroughs, the
poet-naturalist, whose little books of nature we have
most of us been reading lately in their charming
Edinburgh reprint, all sorts of conditions of men
indeed have given their word for him

To get at the full bearing of his life upon his
poems, however, let us return to the very begin-
ning, and trace, briefly at least, his boyhood and
youth. In his Specimen Days and Collect, an
autobiographical volume of incomparable prose-
notes, as well as in many of the poems, Walt
Whitman refers constantly to the great influence
of his early childish days in their free open-air
environment upon his mental and spiritual growth.
He was, indeed, wonderfully happy in his early
surroundings,&#;in his vigorous healthy parentage

and home influences. Born on Long Island, or
Paumanok, its Indian name, by which he always
calls it, in the State of New York, of a stalward
race of farmers, in , the freedom of sun and
wind was his, in a wide country-side, with rising
hills around, and the sea that he has sung so
affectionately, with such deep sympathy, so that
its harmonies seem to have subtly informed his
poetry, close by. Some of the early pages in
Specimen Days give a delightful and vivid descrip-
tion of these boyish haunts, and the old home-
stead of the Whitmans and the Val Velsors
&#;his mother's family&#;as visited after more than
forty years' absence. A note by John Burroughs,
describing briefly the house where Walt Whitman
was born and bred, says:&#;"The Whitmans lived
in a long storey-and-a-half farm-house, hugely
timbered, which is still standing. A great smoke-
canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and chimney,
formed one end of the house, where rousing wood
fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights.
. . . I must not forget to mention that both the
families were near enough to the sea to behold it
from the high places, and to hear in still hours the
roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a
peculiar sound at night." There is a temptation
to quote a great many of Whitman's own notes
about the neighbourhood, but only a brief excerpt
or two can be given. "The spreading Hempstead
plains in the middle of the island," give us
one such note of pastoral feeling. "I have
often been out on the edges of these plains toward
sundown, and can yet recall in fancy the intermin-

able cow-processions, and hear the music of the
tin or copper bells clanking far or near, and
breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic
evening air, and note the sunset." Again and
again he touches on the sea with an affection
and a truth of description which make these
careless jottings unspeakably suggestive. "As
I write," he says in one place, "the whole exper-
ience comes back to me after the lapse of forty and
more years&#;the soothing rustle of the waves, and
the saline smell&#;boyhood's times, the clam-digging,
the creek&#;the perfume of the sedge meadows&#;
the hay-boat, and the fishing excursions;&#;or, of
later years, little voyages down and out New York
bay, in the pilot boats." While still a child his
father moved to Brooklyn&#;then a country-town,
thoroughly rural in character&#;"at that time broad
fields and country roads everywhere around," and
still within easy reach of the sea. Here his school-
days, and his general apprenticeship to life as
printer, journalist, magazine-writer, and so on were
mainly passed, up to his twentieth year, when he
went to New York. A strong, healthy boyhood
and youth his seems to have been throughout, out
of which the poetic and literary faculty natively
grew in a way as unlike the routine academic
tradition as well could be. Give a healthy boy
books like the Waverly Novels, and the Arabian
Nights, in such a life as this, with a suggestive suffi-
ciency of mental and physical work, and you have
given him what mere formal scholasticism will
never accomplish for him, in true poetic insight.

WALT WHITMAN.

xvii

The next twelve years, spent variously in street
and field, in New York, Brooklyn, New Orleans,
and other cities, with long intervals always
of country life in the wide sweep of valley
and plain and seashore, during which he
sounded the teeming life of the fast-growing
United States, may be deemed, say Dr. Bucke,
the special preparation-time for the writing
of the Leaves of Grass. Although, accordingly,
one would like to comment at length upon these
years of young manhood, it is unnecessary. The
reader will find its true history and illustrations in the
poems themselves. In some respects, however,
the more detailed accounts possible in prose,
given in Specimen Days, casts valuable added light
upon this probation-time, and his great zest for
certain sides of life. His "passion for ferries," for
instance, that finds final outcome in the well-known
poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," has a character-
istic note. Referring to the Fulton Ferry, curiously
identified with his life in Brooklyn and New York,
he writes:&#;"Almost daily I crossed in the boats,
often up in the pilot-houses, where I could get a full
sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surround-
ings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath;
the great tides of humanity also, with ever shifting
movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion
for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming,
never-failing, living poems. The river and bay
scenery, all about New York island, any time of a
fine day&#;the hurrying, splashing seat-tides&#;the
changing panorama of steamers . . . the myriads
of white-sail'd schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the

xviii

WALT WHITMAN.

marvellously beautiful yachts . . . what refresh-
ment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me
years ago, and many a time since." In the same
way are described experiences of the teeming
streets; the omnibuses, and the always typical
race, since old English coaches first ran, of drivers;
the theatres and their plays and players, and, with
special stress, the operas and famous singers, for
Whitman was always enthusiastically susceptible
to music of all kinds.

To this tumultuous wealth of experience succeeds
naturally the preparation, and then at last the
publication, of the Leaves of Grass volume, which
marks memorably the year A great deal of
the matter found in the present volume has been
added since the issue of this first edition&#;a thin
royal octavo, generally described as a quarto,
of ninety-four pages; but the significance of Whit-
man's departure from the old routine of poetry
was marked in it in a way that no further addition
could make more striking. It is not strange,
therefore, that the book gained scant recogni-
tion. It was not until Emerson sent to Walt
Whitman what was really his first recognition
from the literary world, the now famous letter
of greeting, that the book became at all known.
A characteristic passage or two from this letter
may be given:&#;"I am not blind to the worth
of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I
find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and
wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I
give you joy of your free and brave thought. I
have great joy in it. I find incomparable things,

said incomparably well, as they must be. I find
the courage of treatment which so delights us,
and which large perception only can inspire. . . .
I greet you at the beginning of a great career,
which yet must have had a long foreground some-
where for such a start. . . . " Of this letter, which
was published eventually in the New York Tribune,
Dr. Bucke says:&#;"Though it could not arrest, it
did service in partially offsetting the tide of adverse
feeling and opinion which overwhelmingly set in
against the poet and his book." And in the same
chapter he notes:&#;"The first reception of Leaves of
Grass by the world was in fact about as disheartening
as it could be. Of the thousand copies of this
edition, some were given away, most of them were
lost, abandoned, or destroyed." Of this thousand,
however, certain of the copies had a history not
noted in this instance, but told to the present
writer by William Bell Scott, the well-known
painter and poet, who thus became the means of
introducing Walt Whitman to the English republic
of letters. The summer following the publication
of the book, that is in , a man, James Grindrod
by name, arrived in Sunderland from the United
States, with a stock of American books&#;surplus
copies, remainders, and so on&#;among which
were the copies of Leaves of Grass mentioned.
These books he disposed of my a curious system of
dealing, called hand-selling, a rough and ready
sort of auction, by which an article is first put up
at a certain price and then gradually brought
down until it finds a purchaser. This unlicensed
street auctioneering most of those who are familiar

with north-country town and their market days
must have often witnessed, and in this way certain
copies of Leaves of Grass fell into the hands of
Thomas Dixon&#;a well-known native of Sunder-
land, to whom Ruskin wrote the famous letters
ultimately published as "Time and Tide Weare
and Tyne." Thomas Dixon in his turn sent three
of the copies thus acquired to William Bell Scott,
who at once perceiving the unique quality of the
book, sent forthwith one copy, which has become
in its way historical, to William Michael Rossetti.
For this copy gave the germinal suggestion of
W. M. Rossetti's volume of ten years later&#;
"Selected Poems by Walt Whitman," which
for long well serve as the only representative
of the poet in England. It is noteworthy in
relation to this episode that Mr. William Bell
Scott, who first gave greeting and encourage-
ment to another poet, of quite opposite order&#;a
poet of romanticism like Dante Gabriel Rossetti&#;
should act also as the herald of Walt Whitman&#;
poet above everything of the actual, and the higher
realism.

Further leaves were added to Leaves of Grass

out of the abounding experiences of the years
between and , over which we must leap
hastily to the outbreak of the Civil War,&#;an event
of heroic importance in Whitman's life. It was a
heroic opportunity indeed, and he used it like a
hero, serving with passionate devotedness as a
nurse to the wounded. The news of his brother's
wound first called him hurriedly to the seat of
war, and thus beginning his ministry, he tended

the wounded soldiers with a love and tenderness
which with his peculiar invigorative influence
had effects sometimes almost miraculous. And
as he bore himself in this ordeal of death and
horror of blood, so he afterwards sang. No war
since rumours of war first began ever had such a
record as is to be found in his war-poems,
from the stirring "First O Songs for a Prelude," to
the final strains,&#;"Spirit whose work is done,"
"Adieu O Soldiers," and the beautiful last of
the series, "To the leaven'd soil they trod,"
wherein he tells with such exquisite imaginative
suggestion of untying the tent ropes for the
last time and letting the freshness of the morning
wind, sunned and scented with the restoring scent
of grass and all growing things, go blowing through,
sweeping away for ever the clinging odours of war
and death which had made the air sickly and
terrible for so long, while the eye sent its glance
with a thrill of escape to the wide, calm sweep of
hills and plains in the distant sunlight, instinct with
the sentiment of restored peace and beauty.

But at the war's end it was not the same robust,
virile man who came out of that hospital tent.
"Three unflinching years of work in that terrible
suspense and excitement changed him," says Dr.
Bucke, "from a young to an old man. Under the
constant and intense moral strain to which he
was subjected . . . he eventually broke down.
The doctors called his complaint "hospital malaria,'
and perhaps it was; but that splendid physique
was sapped by labour, watching, and still more by
the emotions, dreads, deaths, uncertainties of three

xxii

WALT WHITMAN.

years, before it was possible for hospital malaria
or any similar cause to overcome it. This illness
(the first he ever had in his life), in the hot
summer of , he never entirely recovered from
&#;and never will." He hardly gave himself even
time for a temporary recovery before returning to
his hospital work, between which and his occupation
as a clerk in the Government offices he divided his
time up to the war's end.

There is no need perhaps to dwell here upon the
story of his stupid dismissal from one office by a
certain benighted official because of the alleged
immorality of Leaves of Grass, though it was this
that provoked W. D. O'Connor to his remarkable,
if rather combative, manifesto on the poet's behalf,
entitled "The Good Grey Poet." This was in
It must be kept in mind, however, that this was
only an extreme instance of the social and literary
persecution which was levelled at him from the
first. "To the pure all things are pure";&#;it was
from this standpoint that Walt Whitman wrote.
But there were critics who, instead of meeting with
courtesy this poetic attempt to raise noble functions,
long ignobly tainted with obscenity, to their
true dignity and natural relation in the great
scheme of earth and heaven, attacked him
with incredible viciousness and rancour. As,
however, considerations of Mrs. Grundy have
caused the omission of the poems objected to in
the present volume, there is no need to dwell
further upon the matter here.

There are many delightful glimpses to be got in
John Burroughs's Notes, and in his capital little

WALT WHITMAN.

xxiii

book, Birds and Poets, as well as from other
sources quoted in the Life, of Walt Whitman's
way of life in Washington during the following
years; until , in fact. In these various notes
he is seen facing life with almost the same exu-
berant vigour as in the first heat of youth, only
tempered a little by the inroads of time and the
ill-health incurred in the war. One account speaks
of his being seen daily "moving around in
the open air, especially fine mornings and evenings,
observing, listening to, or socially talking with all
sorts of people, policemen, drivers, market men,
old women, the blacks, or dignitaries." It con-
tinues:&#;"Altogether, perhaps, the good, grey
poet is rightly located here. Our wide spaces,
great edifices, the bredth of our landscape, the
ample vistas, the splendour of our skies, night and
day, with the national character, the memoirs of
Washington and Lincoln, and others that might be
named, make our city, above all others, the one
where he fitly belongs. Walt Whitman is now in
his fifty-second year, hearty and blooming, tall,
with his white beard and long hair. The older he
gets the more cheerful and gay hearted he grows."

In spite of light heart and cheery temper his
ill-health increased upon him, and culminated at
last in a parylitic seizure, in February , from
which he had almost recovered when in May the
same year his mother died somewhat suddenly in
Camden, New Jersey, in his presence. "That
event," says his chronicler, "was a terrible blow to
him, and after the occurrence he became much
worse. He left Washington for good, and took up

xxiv

WALT WHITMAN.

his residence in Camden. . . . And now for several
years," it continues, Ihis life hung upon a thread.
Though he suffered at times severely, he never
became dejected or impatient. It was said by one
of his friends that in that combination of illness,
poverty, and old age, Walt Whitman has been
more grand than in the full vigour of his manhood.
For along with illness, pain, and the burden of
age, he soon had to bear poverty also." Of his
poverty there is no need to say more than that it
resulted from traits of generosity and kindliness
that a money-making world might call imprudence,
but that the poets have conspired in their one-sided
way to call human nature. Recovering somewhat
as time went by, so he has lived on, up to the present
day, taking still the same delight in nature and
in men, exploring the old country-sides and visiting
new ones, publishing new editions of Leaves of
Grass, and issuing, too, the special outcome of
these later years, the unique book of prose autobio-
graphical jottings already alluded to, Specimen
Days and Collect, "the brightest and halest Diary
of and Invalid," says Dr. Bucke, "ever written&#;a
book unique in being the expression of strength
in infirmity&#;the wisdom of weakness&#;so bright
and translucent, at once of the earth, earthly, and
spiritual as of the sky and stars. Other books of
the invalid's room require to be read with the
blind's drawn down and the priest on the threshold;
but this sick man's chamber is the lane, and by the
creek or sea-shore&#;always with the fresh air and
the open sky overhead."

Along with Specimen Days were written from

time to time further poems, and added to the
previous collection of Leaves of Grass. The latter
volume was also revised, and its arrangement unified,
certain of the poems which repeated what was
also given in others being left out, and the
whole re-touched and altered so as to give a certain
epic unity that was rather lacking before. This
brings us to consider the poems in themselves,
and their full bearing in life and in letters. At
once, from the first glance at Whitman's poetry,
the reader will see that it is utterly, incomparably
unlike anything our ordinary rhymesters have
accustomed us to. So apparently abrupt a depart-
ure in poetic form and diction may at first cause
a certain feeling of distrust. But looking closer,
it is soon discovered that here is not, as has been
alleged with much asseveration, the freak of a writer
trying to be eccentric at all hazards, but the genuine
outcome of a quite new and vastly extended appre-
hension of life and letters. If Walt Whitman
had merely come forward with a re-presentment of
the ordinary poetaster's topics,&#;rose-water agonies,
drawing-room romances, and so on, such a departure
might well be cavilled at. But here comes a poet
who has set himself resolutely to deal with the
vast developments of the Nineteenth Century, all the
teeming life and work of the Americas and of the
wider world still, under aspects startlingly different
in their scope and tremendous significance to
anything the world has known before, and we
quarrel with him, forsooth, because he has not
expressed himself in elegiacs, or the measures
of the time of Queen Elizabeth. In life, in

xxvi

WALT WHITMAN.

science, in philosophy, even in religion, let us be
liberal. But in poetry:&#;No! there is safety in
conservatism. This is really what it amounts to.

A briefest backward glance through the history
of letters teaches another conclusion; constantly,
it will be found, the order of poetic expression is
changing and developing. But we do not need to
make any far historical excursion for light on
the subject: the experience of almost every poet
will show us the simple rationale of the matter.
The first literary instinct of the young writer is
always to transcend the traditional means of utter-
ance; the conventional forms have lost their vital
response to the subject, he feels; they want
re-adjusting, renewing. As he goes on he reconciles
in time the new need with the old equipment,
bringing in as much fresh force and quality as his
genius and energy can satisfactorily compass.
This achievement of renovated modes of utterance
is of course largely dependent upon the new condi-
tions of life, and therefore of literary subject-matter,
amid which he is placed. But what must be
specially remarked, it is not usually from too ardent
a renascence of words and their art forms that a
writer fails in the translation of life, but usually
from his being overawed by tradition. Convention
is the curse of poetry, as it is the curse of every-
thing else, in which at a second remove the outward
show can be made to pass muster for the inward
reality. Now, the hastiest glimpse at the conditions
under which a poet who has attempted to deal with
the whole scope of the new civilisation, and with
all that it implies of new science, new philosophy,

WALT WHITMAN.

xxvii

and so on, is placed, will show at once that an order
of things so vastly different from any order of the
past must require a new poetic approach. This
new approach Walt Whitman has set himself
courageously to accomplish, and whatever exception
is taken to the details of his method, there is no
young writer, with an eye to the vast human needs
of the time, and not hopelessly encumbered with
tradition, but will feel, I am sure, that here is at
last an initiative, most powerful and intense, which
he must after this bear constantly in mind.

Poetry of the last few decades in England has
occupied itself mainly with archaic or purely ideal
subjects, with specialist experiments in psychology
and morbid anatomy, or the familiar stock material
of fantasy and sentiment. For these a certain art-
glamour, so to speak,&#;a certain metrical remove,
&#;is required as a rule, which can be best attained,
perhaps, by the fine form and dainty colour of
rhyming verse. And there will always, let us hope,
be those who will continue to supply this artistic
poetry, bringing as it does so much inestimable
enchantment to the everyday life. Up to the pre-
sent it may be that this poetry has fairly satisfied
the need of the time,&#;a time occupied too much
with its processes of material civilisation and
wealth-acquirement to attend very truly to the
ideal. But standing now on the verge of a
new era&#;an era of democratic ascendancy&#;it
may be well to ask ourselves, even in conserva-
tive England, whether, seeing the immense poetic
need of a time dangerously possessed of new and
tremendous forces, this poetry of archaic form and

xxviii

WALT WHITMAN.

sentiment is likely to be equal to the hour. We
want now a poetry that shall be masterfully con-
temporary, of irresistible appeal to the hearts of the
people; and this we certainly have not in England
to-day. The critic will say in reply at once, But
look at Tennyson, look at Browning! And he is
right in insisting upon their great claim. But if we
ask ourselves, What then is Tennyson's distinctive
achievement in poetry? we have to answer, The
Idylls of the King: and Browning's? The Ring
and the Book. It does not need a prophet to see
at once that there is no hope of poems like these,&#;
masterpieces as both of them are in quite different
ways&#;ever really reaching the people at all. So
with their poetry throughout; with all its human
feeling and imagination, one feels that it is
of ease and refinement. While the wider audience
of the people has been vastly increasing, it seems
as if the poets had been turning away from it more
and more since the time of Burns. It is a far cry
from Burns,&#;even from Wordsworth,&#;to Tennyson
and Browning.

It may seem that a dangerous comparison has
been invited in these instances, but it is one that
must be faced straightforwardly. The name of
Burns suggests a solution of the whole matter. He
at any rate sang out of an abounding sympathy with,
and knowledge of, the popular need of his day,&#;

"Deep in the general heart of men

His power survives."

In his songs he relied not only upon the great

WALT WHITMAN.

xxix

elementary passions and sentiments of men for his
inspiration, but also upon the natural idiom of
speech and the music in vogue at his time. Of
course we do not say, copy the method of Burns;
but we do say, copy his literary response to life,
and his reliance upon contemporary idiom and
tune. If it be asked now, as naturally it will, if in
Walt Whitman we have a poet who has tried to do
this, the answer is unmistakable. His poetry may
not be powerful in "the general heart of men" yet,
as were the songs of Burns in his time; but we have
to remember the incalculable enlargement of life
since then, and the enormously increased difficulties
of the task, especially, as before remarked, in the
case of one who, like Walt Whitman, sets himself
to cope with the whole universal, cosmic sweep of
space and time. His is, therefore, as he has
constantly affirmed, an initiative, rather than a con-
summation in poetry. "Poets to come!" he
cries:&#;

"Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!

Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,

But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater

than before known

Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the

future,

I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in

the darkness."

Of the virtue of his work as a final accomplishment
in poetry, there would probably be no two English
readers able to agree. What it is wished to lay

stress on here, is that, as he has been the first to
attempt this great work, so his significance as a
pioneer, as an initiator, is beyond all dispute. He is
suggestive rather than completive; but his sugges-
tion is to the younger minds of to-day by far the
greatest thing that is to be found in contemporary
poetic movement.

Thinking on this suggestion, first of all from its
purely literary side, we are brought face to face at
once with problems of extreme difficulty, which
have been suggestively treated by William Sloane
Kennedy and other American writers recently, but
which it will be rather attempted to roughly state
than to solve here. The whole of Whitman's depart-
ure in poetry is concerned with the vexed question
of prose and verse, and the proper functions of the
two modes of expression. Absolutely stated, prose
is the equivalent of speech in all its range; verse,
of song. But it is evident at once that the matter
does not rest here. In a hundred ways needs arise
which cannot be met by a strict adherence to this
line of demarcation, as when, for instance, an
elevation of utterance is required that yet does not,
properly speaking, arise into pure song. In the
right adjustment then of the relations betwixt prose
and verse lies the difficult secret of the art of words.
Whitman noting in his literary work the restricting
effect of exact rhyme measures, sought to attain a
new poetic mode by a return to the rhythmic move-
ment of prose, with what signal result may be
seen by a sympathetic dive almost anywhere into

Leaves of Grass. It is a substitution, it is found at
once, of harmony for melody; of a larger, more

WALT WHITMAN.

xxxi

epic music for the old lyric movements of poetry.
This tendency is indeed one of the time; we find
the same in music, as in Wagner, and his disciple
Dvorák,&#;a tendency to advance further and further
from tune towards complicate harmonic orchestral
effects. And the advance is a great one beyond a
doubt. The only danger is that in accepting
this new tendency, we may neglect the great
virtues of past modes. Always the salvation of
all art-expression lies in the perfect adjustment
of the new with the old. It is earnestly to be
desired, therefore, that the "poets to come,"
especially those of the immediate future, will be
wise enough to see this, and, taking the initiative
of Walt Whitman greatly to heart, yet have the
high artistic sanity to eschew his mannerisms and
incidental weaknesses, and follow only what is
essential and supreme in his method, reconciling it
intelligently with his noble teaching of the old
masters of song. A newer, grander harmony it
has been his to herald; but we who come of Celtic
stock feel that the older music, the old tunes of the
heart, have still a great future, and that it is in
the right adjustments of their simple music with the
new that the success of poetry as a minister of life
in the future will lie.

Thinking on Walt Whitman's initiative in the
larger sense, and turning over the Leaves of Grass

in a spirit of sympathetic response,&#;of response as
if to a work of nature, rather than of art,&#;the
consciousness of an intimate new seeing of things
there thrills one through and through. It is not
now the testament of the universal love for men

xxxii

WALT WHITMAN.

alone, which we laid stress upon earlier in these
pages, but the utterly new poetic insight into the
conditioning of human life and action. For
though Walt Whitman's deliverance has been
prepared for and precedented in philosophy, as
in Hegel, for instance, to whom he unhesi-
tatingly states his indebtedness, in poetry it is
quite new. Ideas for long the sole property
of the philosophical coteries, and moving within
the close range of academic influence, are here set
humanly free in song, emotionally related to the
common life of man. With Whitman the emotional
is all in all, and includes the intellectual, as it were;
and the reader who would understand his full
significance must bring natural and noble feeling to
the task. Given this, and his apparent confusions
and violent paradoxes assume poetic order and
stimulus. With Hegel, he is a mystic, in the
profoundest sense; but his mysticism is one that
it does not require academic equipment to master,&#;
it is the mysticism whose germs are to be found in
the most ignorant being who, awaking at morning,
sees that the sun is shining, and is unconsciously
glad.

"I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the

Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of

hell are with me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I

translate into a new tongue."

It is this new translation of the old sorrows and
shames and degradations, and their redemption as
parts of the divine order of human life, that many

WALT WHITMAN.

xxxiii

critics have found so intolerable in Leaves of
Grass; but let us rather be glad for so timely
a deliverance from an old bondage. It is only
a highest imagination that can so relate and
ennoble things. The poets and so-called idealists
in art have of recent times trusted to incidental
and adventitious aids,&#;the aids of picturesque
associations, romance-interest, and so on, to give
their subjects poetic relation; but Walt Whit-
man has essayed to rely upon the essential
primary conditions of being and thought. From
this resolute reliance upon the unalterable basis of
the divine order he is able to face hopefully prob-
lems of this often seemingly so hopeless age,
finding under all the tumult of misery and evil the
celestial promise:

"In this broad earth of ours,

Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,

Enclosed and safe within its central heart,

Nestles the seed perfection."

This reliance enables him to speak with superb
faith in its future of the Democracy that is so
unsettling the old feudal relations, in art as well
as in political and social life. And the poet whose
apprehension has at once so wide a scientific
extension, and such an emotional impulse, may
well find his heart large enough to embrace life's
illimitable multitudes. The idea of a great loving
confederacy of men and women, united in the
undying cause of Truth and Beauty, gives a most
noble human appeal to many of his poems. "Come,"
he cries,&#;

xxxiv

WALT WHITMAN.

"Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone

upon,

I will make the divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the

rivers of America, and along the shores of the great

lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each

other's necks,

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades."

Again:&#;

"I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the

attacks of the whole rest of the earth,

I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,

Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust

love, it led the rest,

It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that

city,

And in all their looks and words."

It is not possible here to go much into detail in
speaking of the great wealth of poetry to be found
in Leaves of Grass. Perhaps it is best for the
uninitiated reader to begin with the "Inscriptions,"
then turn to the section called "Calamus," (Calamus
being a sort of American grass which is used here
to typify comradeship and love!) reading two or
three poems there. Proceeding then, turn to the
more simply tuneful summons of "Pioneers! O
Pioneers!" in the "Birds of Passage" series, after
which it would be an impertinence to direct further,

WALT WHITMAN.

xxxv

except perhaps to suggest a return to the beginning
of the book to read "Starting from Paumanok,"
which is a sort of overture to Whitman's after music.
By this time the reader's fate as far as Walt
Whitman's influence is concerned will be decided.
Either will have come the supreme joy of the
approach to a new poet, or the tedium of an
unappreciated book.

Many of Whitman's most characteristic poems
have necessarily been omitted from a volume like the
present, intended for an average popular English
audience&#;an audience which, be it confessed,
from the actual experiment of the present editor, is
apt to find much of Leaves of Grass as unintelli-
gible as Sordello, not without a certain excuse haply
in some instances. The method of selection adopted
in preparing the volume has certainly not been
scientific or very profoundly critical. The limitations
of the average run of readers have been, as far as
they could be surmised, the limitations of the book,
and upon the head of that unaccountable class, who
have in the past been guilty of not a few poets'
and prophets' maltreatment, rest any odium the
thorough-paced disciple of Walt Whitman may
attach to the present venture. For those who wish
to thoroughly apprehend the Leaves of Grass it will
be necessary, let it be said at once, to study them
in their complete forms, which is to be obtained in
the edition of Messrs. Wilson & McCormick, of
Glasgow; as also the indispensable Specimen Days
and Collect, and the Life by Dr. Maurice Bucke,
mentioned in these pages. The Specimen Days

volume also contains the famous preface to the

xxxvi

WALT WHITMAN.

first edition of Leaves of Grass; a very important
commentary on the tendencies of the time,
entitled Democratic Vistas; a suggestive essay,
Poetry To-Day in America; and a lecture on
Abraham Lincoln, delivered several times in the
last few years in the United States. Dr. Bucke's
Life, which is simply invaluable as a straightfor-
wardly enthusiastic presentment of a great and
heroic nature, contains, too, W. D. O'Connor's
Good Grey Poet, and a valuable appendix of con-
temporary American notices; the Glasgow edition
having a similar list of English ones compiled by
Professor Dowden. In this English list the names
of Ruskin, Tennyson, Swinburne, Buchanan,
Symonds, and other leading poets and writers,
bear unique testimony to Whitman's influence.

At last, in thinking on all that might have been
said to aid the true apprehension of one of the few
true books that have appeared in the present
generation, these jottings of comment and sug-
gestion seem, on looking over them, more or less
futile and beyond the mark. But it would be im-
possible for any writer, and especially for a young
writer, to speak at all finally and absolutely in
dealing with a nature so unprecedented and so
powerful. All that he can hope to do is to suggest
and facilitate the means of approach. Else there is
a great temptation to dwell upon many matters left
untouched, and specially to enlarge with enthusiasm
on certain of the poetic qualities of the book. Of
Whitman's felicitous power of words at his best; of
his noble symphonic movement in such poems as
the heroic funeral-song on President Lincoln,&#;

WALT WHITMAN.

xxxvii

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd"&#;(part
of which, be it remembered, has been set to music
by one of our leading young composers, C.
Villiers Stanford); of his subtle translation of
those glimpses of the hidden subtle essences of
Nature that the artist finds so elusive and yet so
insistent; of his original sense, too, of the inner and
outer human aspects: it were a long, startlingly
unconventional commentary that satisfactorily
expressed these and a hundred things besides.

Apart from any mere literary qualities or excel-
lences, what needs lastly to have all stress laid
upon it, is the urgent, intimate, personal influence
that Walt Whitman exerts upon those who approach
him with sympathy and healthy feeling. There are
very few books that have this fine appeal and
stimulus; but once the personal magnetism of
Walt Whitman has reached the heart, it will be
found that his is a stimulus unlike any other in
its natural power. His influence is peculiarly
individual, and therefore, from his unique way of
relating the individual to the universal, peculiarly
organic and potent for moral elevation. Add to
this, that he is passionately contemporary, dealing
always with the ordinary surroundings, facing
directly the apparently unbeautiful and unheroic
phenomena of the everyday life, and not asking his
readers away into some airy outer-where of pain-
ful return, and it will be found that the new
seeing he gives is of immediate and constant
effect, making perpetually for love and manliness
and natural life. With this seeing, indeed, the com-
monest things, the most trifling actions, become

xxxviii

WALT WHITMAN.

transformed and idealised, so that a new dignity
enters unawares by the very doorway of the
commonplace, ennobling the faces and voices of
those around with a divine promise, and making
dishonour and unchivalry impossible.

It is the younger hearts who will thrill to this
new incitement,&#;the younger natures, who are
putting forth strenuously into the war of human
liberation. Older men and women have established
their mental and spiritual environment; they
work according to their wont. They, many of
them, look with something of derision at this san-
guine devotion to new ideals, and haply utter smiling
protests against the deceptive charms of all things
novel. But if the ideals informing Leaves of Grass

are in one sense very new, they are also very old,&#;
as old as the world itself. And in the same way,
although Walt Whitman is an innovator, he follows
as naturally in the literary order as did Marlowe
for instance, and after him, Shakespeare, in their
day; and is as natively related to this time. The
poet who derives in the Nineteenth Century from
the Bible, and from Homer,&#;appreciating such
later influences as Carlyle's in letters, Hegels' in
philosophy, J. F. Millet's in art, and Wagner's in
music, is not blind to the great teaching of the past;
and if to this he brings a later seeing all his own,
we who are young may well respond to him, too, in
turn, and advance fearlessly in the lines of his
unique initiative. To the younger hearts and
minds, then, be these Leaves of Grass, gathered and
interwoven as the emblem of a corresponding
fellowship of men and women, dedicate!

WALT WHITMAN.

xxxix

"The prairie-grass dividing, its special odour breathing,

I demand of it the spiritual corresponding.

Demand the copious and close companionship of men."

The natural life, informed with virile religious
love,&#;the spirit of comradeship, as opposed to
the antagonism of class with class, and nation with
nation, which has stirred men selfishly and cruelly
so long: this were the salvation, cries Walt Whit-
man, of the new Democracy, inevitably now at
hand. And with his tones of heroic incitement and
earnest remonstrance ringing in our midst, we who
are young may do much in the stress and tumult of
the advance to a new and endangered era for the
high order of love and truth and liberty, for the
divine cause of all heroes and poets.

"Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd!

Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more

august dramas,

I see not America only, not only, Liberty's nation but

other nations preparing,

I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations,

the solidarity of races,

I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the

world's stage.
. . . . . . .

Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me!

(I know not whether I sleep or wake;)

The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring

in shadow behind me,

The unperform'd, more gigantic that ever, advance,

advance upon me."

ERNEST RHYS.
CHELSEA,

Leaves of Grass.
___________

INSCRIPTIONS.
___________
TO FOREIGN LANDS.

I HEARD that you ask'd for something to prove this

puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them

what you wanted.

___________

TO THEE OLD CAUSE.

TO thee old cause!
Thou peerless, passionate, good cause,
Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea,
Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands,
After a strange sad war, great war for thee,
(I think all war through time was really fought, and

ever will be really fought, for thee,)
These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee.

LEAVES OF GRASS.

(A war O soldiers not for itself alone,
Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to

advance in this book.)

Thou orb of many orbs!
Thou seething principle! thou well-kept, latent germ!

thou centre!
Around the idea of thee the war revolving,
With all its angry and vehement play of causes,
(With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,)
These recitatives for thee,&#;my book and the war are

one,
Merged in its spirit I and mine, as the contest hinged

on thee,
As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to

itself,
Around the idea of thee.

___________

ONE'S-SELF I SING.

ONE'S-SELF I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for

the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

IN CABIN'D SHIPS AT SEA.

AS I PONDER'D IN SILENCE.

AS I ponder'd in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring

bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
The making of perfect soldiers.

Be it so, then I answer'd,
I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and

greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight,

advance and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,)

the field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I above all promote brave soldiers.

___________

IN CABIN'D SHIPS AT SEA.

IN cabin'd ships at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large

imperious waves,
Or some lone bark buoy'd on the dense marine,

LEAVES OF GRASS.

Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of

day, or under many a star at night,
By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of

the land, be read,
In full rapport at last.

Here are our thoughts, voyagers' thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then

by them be said,

The sky o'erarches here, we feel the undulating deck

beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless

motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast sug-

gestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing

syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the

melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all

here,
And this is ocean's poem.

Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,
You not a reminiscence of the land alone,
You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos'd I

know not whither, yet ever full of faith,
Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!
Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for

you I fold it here in every leaf;)
Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little

bark athwart the imperious waves,
Chant on, sail on, bear o'er the boundless blue from me

to every sea,
This song for mariners and all their ships.

BEGINNING MY STUDIES.

TO A HISTORIAN.

YOU who celebrate bygones,
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the

races, the life that has exhibited itself,
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics,

aggregates, rulers and priests,
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in

himself in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited

itself, (the great pride of man in himself,)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.

___________

WHEN I READ THE BOOK.

WHEN I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's

life? [my life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing

of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and

indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

___________

BEGINNING MY STUDIES.

BEGINNING my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of

motion,

LEAVES OF GRASS.

The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic

songs.

___________

BEGINNERS.

HOW they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at

intervals,)
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth,
How they inure to themselves as much as to any&#;what

a paradox appears their age,
How people respond to them, yet know them not,
How there is something relentless in their fate all times,
How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation

and reward,
And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for

the same great purchase.

___________

ME IMPERTURBE.

ME imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of

irrational things,
Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles,

crimes, less important than I thought,
Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or

the Tennessee, or far north or inland,

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING.

A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life

of these States or of the coast, or the lakes or

Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for

contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,

rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

___________

THE SHIP STARTING.

LO, the unbounded sea,
On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying

even her moonsails.
The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so

stately&#;below emulous waves press forward,
They surround the ship with shining curving motions

and foam.

___________

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING.

I HEARAmerica singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be

blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or

beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or

leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat,

the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the

hatter singing as he stands,

LEAVES OF GRASS.

The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in

the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young

wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none

else,
The day what belongs to the day&#;at night the party of

young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

___________

WHAT PLACE IS BESIEGED?

WHAT place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the

siege?
Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave,

immortal,
And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery,
And artillery-men, the deadliest that ever fired gun.

___________

STILL THOUGH THE ONE I SING.

STILL though the one I sing,
(One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to

Nationality,
I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O

quenchless, indispensable fire!)

SHUT NOT YOUR DOORS.

SHUT not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd

shelves, yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every

thing,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the

intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

___________

POETS TO COME.

POETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,

greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the

future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back

in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,

turns a casual look upon you and then averts his

face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

___________

LEAVES OF GRASS.

TO YOU.

STRANGER, if you passing meet me and desire to speak

to me, why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

___________

THOU READER.

THOU reader throbbest life and pride and love the same

as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK
___________
1.

STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother,
After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,
Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas,
Or a soldier camp'd or carrying my knapsack and gun,

or a miner in California,
Or rude in my home in Dakota's woods, my diet meat,

my drink from the spring,
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep

recess,
Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and

happy,
Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware

of mighty Niagara,
Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute

and strong-breasted bull,
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars,

rain, snow, my amaze,
Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight

of the mountain-hawk,
And heard at dusk the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush

from the swamp-cedars,
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New

World.

LEAVES OF GRASS.

2.

Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.

This then is life,
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes

and convulsions.

How curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

See revolving the globe,
The ancestor-continents away group'd together,
The present and future continents north and south, with

the isthmus between.

See, vast trackless spaces,
As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,
Countless masses debouch upon them,
They are now cover'd with the foremost people, arts,

institutions, known.

See, projected through time,
For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,
One generation playing its part and passing on,
Another generation playing its part and passing on in its

turn,
With faces turn'd sideways or backward towards me to

listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

3.

Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian!
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
For you a programme of chants.

Chants of the prairies,
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the

Mexican sea,
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and

Minnesota,
Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and

thence equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.

4.

Take my leaves America, take them South and take

them North,
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your

own offspring,
Surround them East and West, for they would surround

you,
And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for

they connect lovingly with you.

I conn'd old times,
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters,
Now if eligible O that the great masters might return

and study me.

In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique?
Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.

LEAVES OF GRASS.

5.

Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or

desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you

have left wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile

among it,)
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever

deserve more than it deserves,
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place with my own day here.

Here lands female and male,
Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here

the flame of materials,
Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow'd,
The ever-tending, the finalè of visible forms,
The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing,
Yes here comes my mistress the soul.

6.

The soul,
Forever and forever&#;longer than soil is brown and

solid&#;longer than water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are

to be the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems

of my soul and of immortality.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

I will make a song for these States that no one State

may under any circumstances be subjected to

another State,
And I will make a song that there shall be comity by

day and by night between all the States, and

between any two of them,
And I will make a song for the ears of the President,

full of weapons with menacing points,
And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces;
And a song make I of the One form'd out of all,
The fang'd and glittering One whose head is over all,
Resolute warlike One including and over all,
(However high the head of any else that head is over all.)

I will acknowledge contemporary lands,
I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute

courteously every city large and small,
And employments! I will put in my poems that with

you is heroism upon land and sea,
And I will report all heroism from an American point of

view.

I will sing the song of companionship,
I will show what alone must finally compact these,
I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly

love, indicating it in me,
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that

were threatening to consume me,
I will lift what has too long kept down those smoulder-

ing fires,
I will give them complete abandonment,
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
For who but I should understand love with all its

sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

LEAVES OF GRASS.

7.

I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,
I advance from the people in their own spirit,
Here is what sings unrestricted faith.

Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may,
I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part

also,
I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation

is&#;and I say there is in fact no evil,
(Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the

land or to me, as any thing else.)

I too, following many and follow'd by many, inaugurate

a religion, I descend into the arena,
(It may be I am destin'd to utter the loudest cries

there, the winner's pealing shouts,
Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above

every thing.)

Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for

religion's sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and

how certain the future is.

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these

States must be their religion,
Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur;
(Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,
Nor land nor man or woman without religion).

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

8.

What are you doing young man?
Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art,

amours?
These ostensible realities, politics, points?
Your ambition or business whatever it may be?

It is well&#;against such I say not a word, I am their

poet also,
But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's

sake,
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the

essential life of the earth,
Any more than such are to religion.

9.

What do you seek so pensive and silent?
What do you need camerado?
Dear son do you think it is love?

Listen dear son&#;listen America, daughter or son,
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess,

and yet it satisfies, it is great,
But there is something else very great, it makes the

whole coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands

sweeps and provides for all.

Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a

greater religion,
The following chants each for its kind I sing.

LEAVES OF GRASS.

My comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third

one rising inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness

of Religion.

Melange mine own, the unseen and the seen,
Mysterious ocean where the streams empty,
Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering

around me,
Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the

air that we know not of,
Contact daily and hourly that will not release me,
These selecting, these in hints demanded of me.

Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing

me,
Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me

to him,
Any more than I am held to the heavens and all the

spiritual world,
After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.

O such themes&#;equalities! O divine average!
Warblings under the sun, usher'd as now, or at noon, or

setting,
Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching

hither,
I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to

them, and cheerfully pass them forward.

As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk,
I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on

her nest in the briers hatching her brood.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

I have seen the he-bird also,
I have paus'd to hear him near at hand inflating his

throat and joyfully singing.

And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really

sang for was not there only,
Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by

the echoes,
But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being

born.

Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating

itself and joyfully singing.

Ma femme! for the brood beyond us and of us,
For those who belong here and those to come,
I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols

stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been

heard upon earth.

I will make the songs of passion to give them their way,
And your songs outlaw'd offenders, for I scan you with

kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as

any.

I will make the true poem of riches,
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres

and goes forward and is not dropt by death;
I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I

will be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but

the equal of the other,

LEAVES OF GRASS.

And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me,

for I am determin'd to tell you with courageous

clear voice to prove you illustrious,
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the

present, and can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it

may be turn'd to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful

than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time

and events are compact,
And that all the things of the universe are miracles,

each as profound as any.

I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference

to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with

reference to all days,
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem

but has reference to the soul,
Because having look'd at the objects of the universe, I

find there is no one nor any particle of one but has

reference to the soul.

Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance, persons, sub-

stances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the

rocks and sands.

All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
How can the real body ever die and be buried?

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

Of your real body and any man's or woman's real body,
Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-

cleaners and pass to fitting spheres,
Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of

birth to the moment of death.

Not the types set up by the printer return their im-

pression, the meaning, the main concern,
Any more than a man's substance and life or a woman's

substance and life return in the body and the soul,
Indifferently before death and after death.

Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main

concern, and includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your

body, or any part of it!

Whoever you are, to you endless announcements!

Daughter of the lands did you wait for your poet?
Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indica-

tive hand?
Toward the male of the States, and toward the female

of the States,
Exulting words, words to Democracy's lands.

Interlink'd, food-yielding lands!
Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton,

sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land

of the apple and the grape!
Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world!

land of those sweet-air'd interminable plateaus!

LEAVES OF GRASS.

Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of

adobie!
Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where

the south-west Colorado winds!
Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware!
Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of

Vermont and Connecticut!
Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks!
Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen's land!
Inextricable lands! the clutch'd together! the pas-

sionate ones!
The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the

bony-limb'd!
The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced

sisters and the inexperienced sisters!
Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!

the diverse! the compact!
The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carol-

inian!
O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations!

O I at any rate include you all with perfect love!
I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any

sooner than another!
O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this

hour with irrepressible love,
Walking New England, a friend, a traveller,
Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer

ripples on Paumanok's sands,
Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwell-

ing in every town,
Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls,
Of and through the States as during life, each man and

woman my neighbour,

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as

near to him and her,
The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet

with any of them,
Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my

house of adobie,
Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in

Maryland,
Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and

ice welcome to me,
Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or

the Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet

welcoming every new brother,
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the

hour they unite with the old ones,
Coming among the new ones myself to be their com-

panion and equal, coming personally to you now,
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on.

For your life adhere to me,
(I may have to be persuaded many times before I con-

sent to give myself really to you, but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have

arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the

universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

LEAVES OF GRASS.

On my way a moment I pause,
Here for you! and here for America!
Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States

I harbinge glad and sublime,
And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the

red aborigines.

The red aborigines,
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls

as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to

us for names,
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez,

Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, [Walla,
Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-
Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart,

charging the water and the land with names.

Expanding and swift, henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and

audacious, [branching,
A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant, and
A new race dominating previous ones and grander far,

with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inven-

tions and arts.

These, my voice announcing&#;I will sleep no more but

arise,
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel

you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented

waves and storms.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

See, steamers steaming through my poems,
See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and

landing.
See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut,

the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude

fence, and the backwoods village,
See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other

the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon

my poems as upon their own shores,
See, pastures and forests in my poems&#;see, animals wild

and tame&#;see, beyond the Kaw, countless herds of

buffalo feeding on short curly grass,
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved

streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless

vehicles, and commerce,
See, the many-cylinder'd steam printing-press&#;see, the

electric telegraph stretching across the continent,
See, through Atlantica's depths pulses American Europe

reaching, pulses of Europe duly return'd,
See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs,

panting, blowing the steam-whistle,
See, ploughmen ploughing farms&#;see, miners digging

mines&#;see, the numberless factories,
See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools&#;see

from among them superior judges, philosophs,

Presidents, emerge, drest in working dresses,
See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States,

me well-belov'd, close-held by day and night,
Hear the loud echoes of my songs there&#;read the hints

come at last.

LEAVES OF GRASS.

O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two

only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph&#;and you shall also;
O hand in hand&#;O wholesome pleasure&#;O one more

desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding&#;to haste, haste on with me.

CALAMUS.
___________

IN PATHS UNTRODDEN.

IN paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all the standards hitherto publish'd, from the

pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
Clear to me now standards not yet publish'd, clear to

me that my soul,
That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades,
Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abash'd, (for in this secluded spot I can

respond as I would not dare elsewhere,)
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet

contains all the rest,
Resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly

attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,
Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first

year,

LEAVES OF GRASS.

I proceed for all who are or have been young men,
To tell the secret my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades.
___________

FOR YOU O DEMOCRACY

COME, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone

upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades

With the life-long love of comrades

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the

rivers of America, and along the shores of the great

lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each

other's necks,

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma

femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

___________

THESE I SINGING IN SPRING.

THESE I singing in spring collect for lovers,
(For who but I should understand lovers and all their

sorrow and joy?

And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I

pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing

not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences where the old stones

thrown there, pick'd from the fields, have accumu-

lated,
(Wild flowers and vines and weeds come up through the

stones and partly cover them, beyond these I pass,)
Far, far in the forest, or sauntering later in summer,

before I think where I go,
Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and

then in the silence,
Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
Some walk by my side and some behind, and some

embrace my arms or neck,
They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker

they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with

them, [is near me,
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever
Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,
Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a

live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of

sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in

the pond-side,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and

returns again never to separate from me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of com-

rades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render

it back!)

LEAVES OF GRASS.

And twigs of maple and a bunch of wild orange and

chestnut,
And stems of currants and plum-blows, and the aromatic

cedar,
These I compass'd around by a thick cloud of spirits,
Wandering, point to or touch as I pass, or throw them

loosely from me,
Indicating to each one what he shall have, giving some-

thing to each;
But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that

I reserve,
I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself

am capable of loving.

___________

OF THE TERRIBLE DOUBT OF APPEARANCES.

OF the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after

all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful

fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men,

hills, shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colours, densities, forms,

may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only

apparitions, and the real something has yet to be

known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound

me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows,

aught of them,)

May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they

indeed but seem) as from my present point of view,

and might prove (as of course they would) nought

of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from

entirely changed points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd

by my lovers my dear friends,
When he in whom I love travels with me or sits a long

while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that

words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade

us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom,

I am silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of

identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

___________

THE BASE OF ALL METAPHYSICS.

AND now gentlemen,
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finalè too for all metaphysics.
(So to the students the old professor,
At the close of his crowded course.)

Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and

Germanic systems, [and Hegel,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ

divine having studied long,

LEAVES OF GRASS.

I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic

systems, [see,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath

Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of