The Complete Works of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman

the overthrown, the hurt, the opprest of the

       whole earth,

       I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race, it becomes

       all mine,

       Mine too the revenges of humanity, the wrongs of ages, baffled feuds

       and hatreds,

       Utter defeat upon me weighs — all lost — the foe victorious,

       (Yet ‘mid the ruins Pride colossal stands unshaken to the last,

       Endurance, resolution to the last.)

       8

       Now trumpeter for thy close,

       Vouchsafe a higher strain than any yet,

       Sing to my soul, renew its languishing faith and hope,

       Rouse up my slow belief, give me some vision of the future,

       Give me for once its prophecy and joy.

      O glad, exulting, culminating song!

       A vigor more than earth’s is in thy notes,

       Marches of victory — man disenthral’d — the conqueror at last,

       Hymns to the universal God from universal man — all joy!

       A reborn race appears — a perfect world, all joy!

       Women and men in wisdom innocence and health — all joy!

       Riotous laughing bacchanals fill’d with joy!

       War, sorrow, suffering gone — the rank earth purged — nothing but joy left!

       The ocean fill’d with joy — the atmosphere all joy!

       Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!

       Enough to merely be! enough to breathe!

       Joy! joy! all over joy!

To a Locomotive in Winter

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      Thee for my recitative,

       Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,

       Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,

       Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

       Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,

       shuttling at thy sides,

       Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

       Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,

       Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,

       The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,

       Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of

       thy wheels,

       Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,

       Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;

       Type of the modern — emblem of motion and power — pulse of the continent,

       For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,

       With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,

       By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,

       By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

      Fierce-throated beauty!

       Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps

       at night,

       Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,

       rousing all,

       Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,

       (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)

       Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,

       Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,

       To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

O Magnet-South

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      O magnet-south! O glistening perfumed South! my South!

       O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all

       dear to me!

       O dear to me my birth-things — all moving things and the trees where

       I was born — the grains, plants, rivers,

       Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,

       over flats of slivery sands or through swamps,

       Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the

       Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,

       O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their

       banks again,

       Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the

       Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings

       or dense forests,

       I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the

       blossoming titi;

       Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast

       up the Carolinas,

       I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,

       the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the

       graceful palmetto,

       I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet,

       and dart my vision inland;

       O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!

       The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,

       The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged

       with mistletoe and trailing moss,

       The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in

       these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the

       fugitive has his conceal’d hut;)

       O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable

       swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the

       alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and

       the whirr of the rattlesnake,

       The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,

       singing through the moon-lit night,

       The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;

       A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn,

       slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful

       ears each well-sheath’d in its husk;

       O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart;

       O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!

       O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and

       never wander more.