Complete Works - Walt Whitman

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Yet certain remembrances of the war for you, and after you,

       And little souvenirs of camps and soldiers, with my love,

       I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs.

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      Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,

       Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields gazing,

       (As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,)

       As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d,

       Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my

       sons, lose not an atom,

       And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,

       And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,

       And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths,

       And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s

       blood trickling redden’d,

       And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,

       My dead absorb or South or North — my young men’s bodies absorb,

       and their precious precious blood,

       Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a

       year hence,

       In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,

       In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give

       my immortal heroes,

       Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an

       atom be lost,

       O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!

       Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.

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      Nor alone those camps of white, old comrades of the wars,

       When as order’d forward, after a long march,

       Footsore and weary, soon as the light lessens we halt for the night,

       Some of us so fatigued carrying the gun and knapsack, dropping

       asleep in our tracks,

       Others pitching the little tents, and the fires lit up begin to sparkle,

       Outposts of pickets posted surrounding alert through the dark,

       And a word provided for countersign, careful for safety,

       Till to the call of the drummers at daybreak loudly beating the drums,

       We rise up refresh’d, the night and sleep pass’d over, and resume our

       journey,

       Or proceed to battle.

      Lo, the camps of the tents of green,

       Which the days of peace keep filling, and the days of war keep filling,

       With a mystic army, (is it too order’d forward? is it too only

       halting awhile,

       Till night and sleep pass over?)

      Now in those camps of green, in their tents dotting the world,

       In the parents, children, husbands, wives, in them, in the old and young,

       Sleeping under the sunlight, sleeping under the moonlight, content

       and silent there at last,

       Behold the mighty bivouac-field and waiting-camp of all,

       Of the corps and generals all, and the President over the corps and

       generals all,

       And of each of us O soldiers, and of each and all in the ranks we fought,

       (There without hatred we all, all meet.)

      For presently O soldiers, we too camp in our place in the

       bivouac-camps of green,

       But we need not provide for outposts, nor word for the countersign,

       Nor drummer to beat the morning drum.

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      The sobbing of the bells, the sudden death-news everywhere,

       The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People,

       (Full well they know that message in the darkness,

       Full well return, respond within their breasts, their brains, the

       sad reverberations,)

       The passionate toll and clang — city to city, joining, sounding, passing,

       Those heart-beats of a Nation in the night.

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      As they draw to a close,

       Of what underlies the precedent songs — of my aims in them,

       Of the seed I have sought to plant in them,

       Of joy, sweet joy, through many a year, in them,

       (For them, for them have I lived, in them my work is done,)

       Of many an aspiration fond, of many a dream and plan;

       Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the flowing eternal identity,

       To Nature encompassing these, encompassing God — to the joyous,

       electric all,

       To the sense of Death, and accepting exulting in Death in its turn

       the same as life,

       The entrance of man to sing;

       To compact you, ye parted, diverse lives,

       To put rapport the mountains and rocks and streams,

       And the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and pine,

       With you O soul.

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      Joy, shipmate, Joy!

       (Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)

       Our life is closed, our life begins,

       The long, long anchorage we leave,

       The ship is clear at last, she leaps!

       She swiftly courses from the shore,

       Joy, shipmate, joy.

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      The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

       Now voyager

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