Complete Works - Walt Whitman

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That sport’st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,

       In them, in thy experiences, had’st thou my soul,

       What joys! what joys were thine!

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      Aboard at a ship’s helm,

       A young steersman steering with care.

      Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,

       An ocean-bell — O a warning bell, rock’d by the waves.

      O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,

       Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

      For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,

       The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,

       The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds

       away gayly and safe.

      But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!

       Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

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      On the beach at night,

       Stands a child with her father,

       Watching the east, the autumn sky.

      Up through the darkness,

       While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,

       Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,

       Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,

       Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,

       And nigh at hand, only a very little above,

       Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

      From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,

       Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,

       Watching, silently weeps.

      Weep not, child,

       Weep not, my darling,

       With these kisses let me remove your tears,

       The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

       They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in

       apparition,

       Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the

       Pleiades shall emerge,

       They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall

       shine out again,

       The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,

       The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall

       again shine.

      Then dearest child mournest thou only for jupiter?

       Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

      Something there is,

       (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,

       I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)

       Something there is more immortal even than the stars,

       (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)

       Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter

       Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,

       Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

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      The world below the brine,

       Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,

       Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick

       tangle openings, and pink turf,

       Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the

       play of light through the water,

       Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes,

       and the aliment of the swimmers,

       Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling

       close to the bottom,

       The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting

       with his flukes,

       The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy

       sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,

       Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,

       breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,

       The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed

       by beings like us who walk this sphere,

       The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

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      On the beach at night alone,

       As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

       As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef

       of the universes and of the future.

      A vast similitude interlocks all,

       All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

       All distances of place however wide,

       All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

       All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in

       different worlds,

       All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

       All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

       All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

       All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

       This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

       And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

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      1

       To-day a rude brief recitative,

       Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,

       Of unnamed heroes in the ships — of waves spreading and spreading

       far as the eye can reach,

       Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,

      

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