The Complete Works of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman

with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,

       This common marvel I beheld — the parent thrush I watch’d feeding its young,

       The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,

       Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

      There ponder’d, felt I,

       If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn’d,

       If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,

       Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;

       Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?

       From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,

       Destin’d to fill the world.

       Italian Music in Dakota

       [“The Seventeenth — the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.”]

      Through the soft evening air enwinding all,

       Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,

       In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes,

       Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,

       (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,

       Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,

       Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,

       Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,

       Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish,

       And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)

       Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,

       Music, Italian music in Dakota.

      While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,

       Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,

       Acknowledging rapport however far remov’d,

       (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)

       Listens well pleas’d.

With All Thy Gifts

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      With all thy gifts America,

       Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,

       Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee — with these and like of

       these vouchsafed to thee,

       What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)

       The gift of perfect women fit for thee — what if that gift of gifts

       thou lackest?

       The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?

       The mothers fit for thee?

My Picture-Gallery

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      In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house,

       It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;

       Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories!

       Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;

       Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,

       With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures.

The Prairie States

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      A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude,

       Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,

       With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,

       By all the world contributed — freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s society,

       The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations,

       To justify the past.

      BOOK XXV

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Proud Music of the Storm

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      1

      Proud music of the storm,

       Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,

       Strong hum of forest tree-tops — wind of the mountains,

       Personified dim shapes — you hidden orchestras,

       You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,

       Blending with Nature’s rhythmus all the tongues of nations;

       You chords left as by vast composers — you choruses,

       You formless, free, religious dances — you from the Orient,

       You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts,

       You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry,

       Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls,

       Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless,

       Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz’d me?

       2

       Come forward O my soul, and let the rest retire,

       Listen, lose not, it is toward thee they tend,

       Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber,

       For thee they sing and dance O soul.

      A festival song,

       The duet of the bridegroom and the bride, a marriage-march,

       With lips of love, and hearts of lovers fill’d to the brim with love,

       The red-flush’d cheeks and perfumes, the cortege swarming full of

       friendly faces young and old,

       To flutes’ clear notes and sounding harps’ cantabile.

      Now loud approaching drums,

       Victoria! seest thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying?

       the rout of the baffled?

       Hearest those shouts of a conquering army?

      (Ah soul, the sobs of women, the wounded groaning in agony,

       The hiss and crackle of flames, the blacken’d ruins, the embers of cities,

       The dirge and desolation of mankind.)

      Now airs antique and mediaeval fill me,

       I see and hear old harpers with their harps at Welsh festivals,

       I hear the minnesingers singing their lays of love,

       I hear the minstrels, gleemen, troubadours, of the middle ages.

      Now the great organ sounds,

       Tremulous, while underneath, (as the hid footholds of the