Complete Works - Walt Whitman

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Victor’s and vanquish’d — Lincoln’s and Lee’s — now thou with them,

       Man of the mighty days — and equal to the days!

       Thou from the prairies! — tangled and many-vein’d and hard has been thy part,

       To admiration has it been enacted!

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      Upon this scene, this show,

       Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,

       (Nor in caprice alone — some grains of deepest meaning,)

       Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes,

       As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill’d with its soul,

       Product of Nature’s sun, stars, earth direct — a towering human form,

       In hunting-shirt of film, arm’d with the rifle, a half-ironical

       smile curving its phantom lips,

       Like one of Ossian’s ghosts looks down.

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      Ah, not this marble, dead and cold:

       Far from its base and shaft expanding — the round zones circling,

       comprehending,

       Thou, Washington, art all the world’s, the continents’ entire — not

       yours alone, America,

       Europe’s as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer’s cot,

       Or frozen North, or sultry South — the African’s — the Arab’s in his tent,

       Old Asia’s there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;

       (Greets the antique the hero new? ’tis but the same — the heir

       legitimate, continued ever,

       The indomitable heart and arm — proofs of the never-broken line,

       Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same — e’en in defeat

       defeated not, the same:)

       Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night,

       Through teeming cities’ streets, indoors or out, factories or farms,

       Now, or to come, or past — where patriot wills existed or exist,

       Wherever Freedom, pois’d by Toleration, sway’d by Law,

       Stands or is rising thy true monument.

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      Of that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank,

       I’ll mind the lesson, solitary bird — let me too welcome chilling drifts,

       E’en the profoundest chill, as now — a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv’d,

       Old age land-lock’d within its winter bay — (cold, cold, O cold!)

       These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet,

       For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last;

       Not summer’s zones alone — not chants of youth, or south’s warm tides alone,

       But held by sluggish floes, pack’d in the northern ice, the cumulus

       of years,

       These with gay heart I also sing.

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      What hurrying human tides, or day or night!

       What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!

       What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee!

       What curious questioning glances — glints of love!

       Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration!

       Thou portal — thou arena — thou of the myriad long-drawn lines and groups!

       (Could but thy flagstones, curbs, facades, tell their inimitable tales;

       Thy windows rich, and huge hotels — thy side-walks wide;)

       Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!

       Thou, like the parti-colored world itself — like infinite, teeming,

       mocking life!

       Thou visor’d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!

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      To get the final lilt of songs,

       To penetrate the inmost lore of poets — to know the mighty ones,

       Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson;

       To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt —

       to truly understand,

       To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,

       Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.

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      Far back, related on my mother’s side,

       Old Salt Kossabone, I’ll tell you how he died:

       (Had been a sailor all his life — was nearly 90 — lived with his

       married grandchild, Jenny;

       House on a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and

       stretch to open sea;)

       The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his

       regular custom,

       In his great arm chair by the window seated,

       (Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)

       Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself —

       And now the close of all:

       One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long — cross-tides

       and much wrong going,

       At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering,

       And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering,

       cleaving, as he watches,

       “She’s free — she’s on her destination” — these the last words — when

       Jenny came, he sat there dead,

       Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother’s side, far back.

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