Complete Works - Walt Whitman

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women gone,

       Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on — and I now

       pondering, Are those women indeed gone?

       Are souls drown’d and destroy’d so?

       Is only matter triumphant?

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      At the last, tenderly,

       From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,

       From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,

       Let me be wafted.

      Let me glide noiselessly forth;

       With the key of softness unlock the locks — with a whisper,

       Set ope the doors O soul.

      Tenderly — be not impatient,

       (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,

       Strong is your hold O love.)

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      As I watch’d the ploughman ploughing,

       Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,

       I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;

       (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)

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      Pensive and faltering,

       The words the Dead I write,

       For living are the Dead,

       (Haply the only living, only real,

       And I the apparition, I the spectre.)

      BOOK XXXI

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      1

       Thou Mother with thy equal brood,

       Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity only,

       A special song before I go I’d sing o’er all the rest,

       For thee, the future.

      I’d sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality,

       I’d fashion thy ensemble including body and soul,

       I’d show away ahead thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish’d.

      The paths to the house I seek to make,

       But leave to those to come the house itself.

      Belief I sing, and preparation;

       As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the present only,

       But greater still from what is yet to come,

       Out of that formula for thee I sing.

      2

       As a strong bird on pinions free,

       Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,

       Such be the thought I’d think of thee America,

       Such be the recitative I’d bring for thee.

      The conceits of the poets of other lands I’d bring thee not,

       Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long,

       Nor rhyme, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign court or indoor

       library;

       But an odor I’d bring as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of

       an Illinois prairie,

       With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas

       uplands, or Florida’s glades,

       Or the Saguenay’s black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron,

       With presentment of Yellowstone’s scenes, or Yosemite,

       And murmuring under, pervading all, I’d bring the rustling sea-sound,

       That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world.

      And for thy subtler sense subtler refrains dread Mother,

       Preludes of intellect tallying these and thee, mind-formulas fitted

       for thee, real and sane and large as these and thee,

       Thou! mounting higher, diving deeper than we knew, thou

       transcendental Union!

       By thee fact to be justified, blended with thought,

       Thought of man justified, blended with God,

       Through thy idea, lo, the immortal reality!

       Through thy reality, lo, the immortal idea!

      3

       Brain of the New World, what a task is thine,

       To formulate the Modern — out of the peerless grandeur of the modern,

       Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches, art,

       (Recast, may-be discard them, end them — maybe their work is done,

       who knows?)

       By vision, hand, conception, on the background of the mighty past, the dead,

       To limn with absolute faith the mighty living present.

      And yet thou living present brain, heir of the dead, the Old World brain,

       Thou that lay folded like an unborn babe within its folds so long,

       Thou carefully prepared by it so long — haply thou but unfoldest it,

       only maturest it,

       It to eventuate in thee — the essence of the by-gone time contain’d in thee,

       Its poems, churches, arts, unwitting to themselves, destined with

       reference to thee;

       Thou but the apples, long, long, long a-growing,

       The fruit of all the Old ripening to-day in thee.

      4

       Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy,

       Of value is thy freight, ’tis not the Present only,

       The Past is also stored in thee,

       Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western

       continent alone,

       Earth’s resume entire floats on thy keel O ship, is steadied by thy spars,

       With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or

       swim with thee,

       With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou

       bear’st the other continents,

       Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant;

       Steer then with

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