Kitabı oku: «Leaves of Grass», sayfa 3

  The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,

  The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;

  And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

  And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

  And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

       16

  I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

  Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

  Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

  Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff

      that is fine,

  One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the

      largest the same,

  A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and

      hospitable down by the Oconee I live,

  A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest

      joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,

  A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin

      leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,

  A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;

  At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen

      off Newfoundland,

  At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,

  At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the

      Texan ranch,

  Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving

      their big proportions,)

  Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands

      and welcome to drink and meat,

  A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,

  A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,

  Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,

  A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,

  Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

  I resist any thing better than my own diversity,

  Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,

  And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

  (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,

  The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,

  The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

       17

  These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they

      are not original with me,

  If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

  If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

  If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

  This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

  This the common air that bathes the globe.

       18

  With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,

  I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for

      conquer’d and slain persons.

  Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?

  I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit

      in which they are won.

  I beat and pound for the dead,

  I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.

  Vivas to those who have fail’d!

  And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!

  And to those themselves who sank in the sea!

  And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!

  And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

       19

  This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,

  It is for the wicked just same as the righteous, I make appointments

      with all,

  I will not have a single person slighted or left away,

  The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,

  The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;

  There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

  This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,

  This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,

  This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,

  This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

  Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?

  Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the

      side of a rock has.

  Do you take it I would astonish?

  Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering

      through the woods?

  Do I astonish more than they?

  This hour I tell things in confidence,

  I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

       20

  Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;

  How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

  What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

  All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,

  Else it were time lost listening to me.

  I do not snivel that snivel the world over,

  That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

  Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity

      goes to the fourth-remov’d,

  I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

  Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

  Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with

      doctors and calculated close,

  I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

  In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,

  And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

  I know I am solid and sound,

  To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

  All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

  I know I am deathless,

  I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,

  I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt

      stick at night.

  I know I am august,

  I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

  I see that the elementary laws never apologize,

  (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,

      after all.)

  I exist as I am, that is enough,

  If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

  And if each and all be aware I sit content.

  One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,

  And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten

      million years,

  I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

  My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

  I laugh at what you call dissolution,

  And I know the amplitude of time.

       21

  I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

  The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

  The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate

      into new tongue.

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,

  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

  I chant the chant of dilation or pride,

  We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,

  I show that size is only development.

  Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?

  It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and

      still pass on.

  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,

  I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

  Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night!

  Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!

  Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.

  Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!

  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!

  Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!

  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!

  Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!

  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!

  Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth!

  Smile, for your lover comes.

  Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!

  O unspeakable passionate love.

  Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight!

  We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.

       22

  You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,

  I behold from the beach your crooked fingers,

  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,

  We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,

  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,

  Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

  Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,

  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,

  Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,

  Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,

  I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

  Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,

  Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.

  I am he attesting sympathy,

  (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that

      supports them?)

  I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet

      of wickedness also.

  What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?

  Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,

  My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,

  I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

  Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?

  Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?

  I find one side a balance and the antipedal side a balance,

  Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,

  Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

  This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,

  There is no better than it and now.

  What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such wonder,

  The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

       23

  Endless unfolding of words of ages!

  And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

  A word of the faith that never balks,

  Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

  It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,

  That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.

  I accept Reality and dare not question it,

  Materialism first and last imbuing.

  Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!

  Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,

  This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of

      the old cartouches,

  These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.

  This is the geologist, this works with the scalper, and this is a

      mathematician.

  Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!

  Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,

  I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

  Less the reminders of properties told my words,

  And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,

  And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and

      women fully equipt,

  And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that

      plot and conspire.

       24

  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

  No more modest than immodest.

  Unscrew the locks from the doors!

  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,

  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current

      and index.

  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,

  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their

      counterpart of on the same terms.

  Through me many long dumb voices,

  Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

  Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

  Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

  And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the

      father-stuff,

  And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

  Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

  Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

  Through me forbidden voices,

  Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

  Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me

      is a miracle.

  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am

      touch’d from,

  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of

      my own body, or any part of it,

  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!

  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!

  Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!

  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!

  Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded

      duplicate eggs! it shall be you!

  Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!

  Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!

  Sun so generous it shall be you!

  Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!

  You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!

  Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!

  Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my

      winding paths, it shall be you!

  Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d,

      it shall be you.

  I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,

  Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,

  I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,

  Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the

      friendship I take again.

  That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,

  A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics

      of books.

  To behold the day-break!

  The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,

  The air tastes good to my palate.

  Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising

      freshly exuding,

  Scooting obliquely high and low.

  Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,

  Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

  The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,

  The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,

  The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

       25

  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

  We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

  We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

  My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

  With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

  Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,

  It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,

  Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?

  Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of

      articulation,

  Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?

  Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,

  The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,

  I underlying causes to balance them at last,

  My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,

  Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search

      of this day.)

  My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,

  Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,

  I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

  Writing and talk do not prove me,

  I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,

  With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

       26

  Now I will do nothing but listen,

  To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

  I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,

      clack of sticks cooking my meals,

  I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

  I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

  Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

  Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of

      work-people at their meals,

  The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

  The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing

      a death-sentence,

  The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the

      refrain of the anchor-lifters,

  The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking

      engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,

  The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

  The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,

  (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

  I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

  I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

  It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

  I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

  Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.

  A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,

  The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

  I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)

  The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

  It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,

  It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,

  I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,

  Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

  At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

  And that we call Being.

       27

  To be in any form, what is that?

  (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)

  If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

  Mine is no callous shell,

  I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

  They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

  I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

  To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

       28

  Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,

  Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,

  Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,

  My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly

      different from myself,

  On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,

  Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,

  Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,

  Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,

  Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,

  Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,

  Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,

  They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,

  No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,

  Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,

  Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

  The sentries desert every other part of me,

  They have left me helpless to a red marauder,

  They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

  I am given up by traitors,

  I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the

      greatest traitor,

  I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

  You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,

  Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

       29

  Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!

  Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

  Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,

  Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

  Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,

  Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

       30

  All truths wait in all things,

  They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

  They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

  The insignificant is as big to me as any,

  (What is less or more than a touch?)

  Logic and sermons never convince,

  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

  (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,

  Only what nobody denies is so.)

  A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,

  I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,

  And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,

  And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,

  And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it

      becomes omnific,

  And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

       31

  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,

  And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg

      of the wren,

  And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,

  And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

  And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

  And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,

  And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

  I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,

      grains, esculent roots,

  And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,

  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,

  But call any thing back again when I desire it.

  In vain the speeding or shyness,

  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,

  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,

  In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,

  In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,

  In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,

  In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,

  In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,

  In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,

  I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

       32

  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and

      self-contain’d,

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of

      owning things,

  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of

      years ago,

  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  So they show their relations to me and I accept them,

  They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their

      possession.

  I wonder where they get those tokens,

  Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

  Myself moving forward then and now and forever,

  Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,

  Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,

  Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,

  Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.

  A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,

  Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,

  Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,

  Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

  His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,

  His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.

  I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,

  Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?

  Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

       33

  Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,

  What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,

  What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,

  And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

  My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,

  I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,

  I am afoot with my vision.

  By the city’s quadrangular houses—in log huts, camping with lumber-men,

  Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,

  Weeding my onion-patch or hosing rows of carrots and parsnips,

      crossing savannas, trailing in forests,

  Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,

  Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the

      shallow river,

  Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the

      buck turns furiously at the hunter,

  Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the

      otter is feeding on fish,

  Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,

  Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the

      beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tall;

  Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant, over

      the rice in its low moist field,

  Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and

      slender shoots from the gutters,

  Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav’d corn, over the

      delicate blue-flower flax,

  Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with

      the rest,

  Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;

  Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low

      scragged limbs,

  Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,

  Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,

  Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great

      goldbug drops through the dark,

  Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to

      the meadow,

  Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous

      shuddering of their hides,

  Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle

      the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;

  Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,

  Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,

  Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it

      myself and looking composedly down,)

  Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat

      hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,

  Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,

  Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,

  Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,

  Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents,

  Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;

  Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,

  Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,

  Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,

  Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,

  Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of

      base-ball,

  At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license,

      bull-dances, drinking, laughter,

  At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the

      juice through a straw,

  At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,

  At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;

  Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles,

      screams, weeps,

  Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are

      scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,

  Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to

      the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,

  Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,

  Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,

  Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles

      far and near,

  Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived

      swan is curving and winding,

  Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her

      near-human laugh,

  Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the

      high weeds,

  Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with

      their heads out,

  Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,

  Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,

  Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at

      night and feeds upon small crabs,

  Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,

  Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over

      the well,

  Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,

  Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,

  Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the

      office or public hall;

  Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with

      the new and old,

  Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,

  Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,

  Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,

  Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher,

      impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting;

  Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon,

      flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,

  Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds,

      or down a lane or along the beach,

  My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;