1891 1891-2
We know not whence, (was the answer,)
We only know that we drift here with the rest,
That we linger'd and lagg'd&emdash;but were wafted
at last, and are now here,
To make the passing shower's concluding drops,
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
Wafting to other work, to unknown songs, conditions,
On, on, ye jocund twain! continue on the same!
1891 1891-2
1889 1891-2
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
1890 1891-2
Down, down, proud gorge! &emdash; though choking thee;
Thy bearded throat and high-borne forehead to the gutter;
Crouch low thy neck to eleemosynary gifts.
(1889) 1891-2
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
(We grand-sons and great-grand-sons do not forget your
grand-sires,)
From fifty Nations and nebulous Nations, compacted, sent
oversea to-day,
America's applause, love, memories and good-will.
1889 1891-2
OVER and through the burial chant,
Organ and solemn service, sermon, bending priests,
To me come interpolation sounds not in the show &emdash; plainly
to me, crowding up the aisle and from the
window,
Of sudden battle's hurry and harsh noises &emdash; war's grim game
to sight and ear in earnest;
The scout call'd up and forward &emdash; the general mounted and
his aids around him &emdash; the new-brought
word &emdash; the
instantaneous order issued;
The rifle crack &emdash; the cannon thud &emdash; the rushing
forth of men
from their tents;
The clank of cavalry &emdash; the strange celerity of forming ranks
&emdash; the slender bugle note;
The sound of horses' hoofs departing &emdash; saddles, arms,
accoutrements.*
1888 1891-2* NOTE. &emdash; CAMDEN. N.J., August 7, 1888. &emdash; Walt Whitman asks the New York Herald "to add his tribute to Sheridan":
"In the grand constellation of five or six names. under Lincoln's Presidency, that history will bear for ages in her firmament as marking the last life-throbs of secession, and beaming on its dying gasps, Sheridan's will be bright. One consideration rising out of the now dead soldier's example as it passes my mind, is worth taking notice of. If the war had continued any long time these States, in my opinion, would have shown and proved the most conclusive military talents ever evinced by any nation on earth. That they possess'd a rank and file ahead of all other known in points of quality and limitlessness of number are easily admitted. But we have, too, the eligibility of organizing, handling and officering equal to the other. These two, with modern arms, transportation and inventive American genius, would make the United States with earnestness, not only able to stand the whole world, but conquer that world united against us."
1890 1891-2
(Of many debts incalculable,
Haply our New World's chiefest debt is to old poems.)
Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of
the Nazarene,
The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of
Eneas,
Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal
tales,
essays, plays.
Shakspere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,
As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,
The great shadowy groups gathering around,
Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,
Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with
courteous hand and word,
ascending,
Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon
them,
blent with their music,
Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared
for by them,
Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.
1891 1891-2
WELCOME, Brazilian brother &emdash; thy ample
place is ready;
A loving hand &emdash; a smile from the north &emdash; a sunny
instant hail!
(Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,
impedimentas,
Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the
acceptance and the faith;)
To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck &emdash; to thee
from us the expectant eye,
Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning
well,
The true lesson of a nation's light in the sky,
(More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,)
The height to be superb humanity.
(1889) 1891-2
1891 1891-2
Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or
South,
Embalm'd with love in this twilight song.
1890 1891-2
1891 1891-2
WHEN his hour for death had come,
He slowly rais'd himself from the bed on the floor,
Drew on his war-dress, shirt, leggings, and girdled the belt
around his waist,
Call'd for vermilion paint (his looking-glass was held before
him,)
Painted half his face and neck, his wrists, and back-hands,
Put the scalp-knife carefully in his belt &emdash; then lying down,
resting a moment,
Rose again, half sitting, smiled, gave in silence his extended
hand to each and all,
Sank faintly low to the floor (tightly grasping the tomahawk
handle,)
Fix'd his look on wife and little children &emdash; the last:
(And here a line in memory of his name and death.)
1890 1891-2
A VOICE from Death, solemn and strange, in all
his sweep and
power,
With sudden, indescribable blow &emdash; towns drown'd &emdash;
humanity
by thousands slain,
The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street,
iron bridge,
Dash'd pell-mell by the blow &emdash; yet usher'd life continuing
on,
(Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling, wild debris,
A suffering woman saved &emdash; a baby safely born!)
Although I come and unannounc'd, in horror and in pang,
In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale elemental crash,
(this voice so solemn, strange,)
I too a minister of Deity.
Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
We mourn the old, the young untimely drawn to thee,
The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
The household wreck'd, the husband and the wife, the engulf'd
forger in his forge,
The corpses in the whelming waters and the mud,
The gather'd thousands to their funeral mounds, and thousands
never found or gather'd.
Then after burying, mourning the dead,
(Faithful to them found or unfound, forgetting not, bearing
the past, here new musing,)
A day &emdash; a passing moment or an hour &emdash; America
itself bends
low,
Silent, resign'd, submissive.
War, death, cataclysm like this, America,
Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart.
E'en as I chant, Io! out of death, and out of ooze and slime,
The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy, help, love,
From West and East, from South and North and over sea,
Its hot-spurr'd hearts and hands humanity to human aid
moves on;
And from within a thought and lesson yet.
Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air!
Thou waters that encompass us!
Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep!
Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all,
incessant!
Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless,
sleepless, calm,
Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral
toy,
How ill to e'er forget thee!
For I too have forgotten,
(Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
wealth, inventions, civilization,)
Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
mighty, elemental throes,
In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is
buoy'd.
1889 1891-2
Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the
rest,
Allah is all, all, all &emdash; is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes &emdash; yet Allah,
Allah, Allah is there.
"Has the estray wander'd far? Is the reason-why strangely
hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of
every life;
The something never still'd &emdash; never entirely gone? the invisible
need of every seed?
"It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one
exception."
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2"THE ROUNDED CATALOGUE DIVINE COMPLETE"
(Sunday_ _ _. _ Went this forenoon to church. A college professor, Rev. Dr._, gave us a fine sermon, during which I caught the above words; but the minister included in his "rounded catalogue" letter and spirit, only the esthetic things, and entirely ignored what I name in the following:)
THE devilish and the dark, the dying and
diseas'd,
The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and
savage,
The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank,
malignant,
Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the
dissolute;
(What is the part the wicked and the loathsome bear within
earth's orbic scheme?)
Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot.
1891 1891-2
MORE experiences and sights, stranger, than
you'd think
for;
Times again, now mostly just after sunrise or before
sunset,
Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear
weather, in plain sight,
Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the
shop-fronts,
(Account for it or not &emdash; credit or not &emdash; it is
all true,
And my mate there could tell you the like &emdash; we have often
confab'd about it,)
People and scenes, animals, trees, colors and lines, plain as
could be,
Farms and dooryards of home, paths border'd with box,
lilacs in corners,
Weddings in churches, thanksgiving dinners, returns of long-
absent sons,
Glum funerals, the crape-veil'd mother and the daughters,
Trials in courts, jury, and judge, the accused in the box,
Contestants, battles, crowds, bridges, wharves,
Now and then mark'd faces of sorrow or joy,
(I could pick them out this moment if I saw them again,)
Show'd to me just aloft to the right in the sky-edge,
Or plainly there to the left on the hill-tops.
1891 1891-2
Haughty this song, its words and scope,
To span vast realms of space and time,
Evolution &emdash; the cumulative &emdash; growths and generations.
Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued,
Wandering, peering, dallying with all &emdash; war, peace, day
and
night absorbing,
Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,
I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.
I sing of life, yet mind me well of death:
To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and
has for years &emdash;
Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
1891 1891-2
Now for my last &emdash; let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.
Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;
Delightful! &emdash; now separation &emdash; Good-bye my Fancy.
Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really
blended into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs,
(who knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning &emdash;
so now finally,
Good-bye &emdash; and hail! my Fancy.
1891 1891-2*Behind a Good-bye there lurks much of the salutation of another beginning&emdash;to me, Development, Continuity, Immortality, Transformation, are the chiefest life-meanings of Nature and Humanity, and are the sine qua non of all facts, and each fact.
Why do folks dwell so fondly on the last words, advice, appearance, of the departing? Those last words are not samples of the best, which involve vitality at its full, and balance, and perfect control and scope. But they are valuable beyond measure to confirm and endorse the varied train, facts, theories and faith of the whole preceding life.
*NOTE. &emdash; Summer country life. &emdash; Several years. &emdash; In my rambles and explorations I found a woody place near the creek, where for some reason the birds in happy mood seem'd to resort in unusual numbers. Especially at the beginning of the day, and again at the ending, I was sure to get there the most copious bird-concerts. I repair'd there frequently at sunrise &emdash; and also at sunset, or just before. . . . Once the question arose in me: Which is the best singing, the first or the latter-most? The first always exhilarated, and perhaps seem'd more joyous and stronger; but I always felt the sunset or late afternoon sounds more penetrating and sweeter &emdash; seem'd to touch the soul &emdash; often the evening thrushes, two or three of them, responding and perhaps blending. Though I miss'd some of the mornings, I found myself getting to be quite strictly punctual at the evening utterances.
ANOTHER NOTE. &emdash;"He went out with the tide and the sunset," was a phrase I heard from a surgeon describing an old sailor's death under peculiarly gentle conditions.
During the Secession War, 1863 and '4, visiting the Army Hospitals around Washington, I form'd the habit, and continued it to the end, whenever the ebb or flood tide began the latter part of the day, of punctually visiting those at that time populous wards of suffering men. Somehow (or I thought so) the effect of the hour was palpable. The badly wounded would get some ease, and would like to talk a little, or be talk'd to. Intellectual and emotional natures would be at their best: Deaths were always easier; medicines seem'd to have better effect when given then, and a lulling atmosphere would pervade the wards.
Similar influences, similar circumstances and hours, day-close, after great battles, even with all their horrors. I had more than once the same experience on the fields cover'd with fallen or dead.