Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman [books to read for 12 year olds txt] 📗

with yourself,

To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue.

 

O the joy of my soul leaning pois’d on itself, receiving identity through

materials and loving them, observing characters and absorbing them,

My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch,

reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like,

The real life of my senses and flesh transcending my senses and flesh,

My body done with materials, my sight done with my material eyes,

Proved to me this day beyond cavil that it is not my material eyes

which finally see,

Nor my material body which finally loves, walks, laughs, shouts,

embraces, procreates.

 

O the farmer’s joys!

Ohioan’s, Illinoisian’s, Wisconsinese’, Kanadian’s, Iowan’s,

Kansian’s, Missourian’s, Oregonese’ joys!

To rise at peep of day and pass forth nimbly to work,

To plough land in the fall for winter-sown crops,

To plough land in the spring for maize,

To train orchards, to graft the trees, to gather apples in the fall.

 

O to bathe in the swimming-bath, or in a good place along shore,

To splash the water! to walk ankle-deep, or race naked along the shore.

 

O to realize space!

The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,

To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying

clouds, as one with them.

 

O the joy a manly self-hood!

To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,

To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic,

To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye,

To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,

To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.

 

Knowist thou the excellent joys of youth?

Joys of the dear companions and of the merry word and laughing face?

Joy of the glad light-beaming day, joy of the wide-breath’d games?

Joy of sweet music, joy of the lighted ball-room and the dancers?

Joy of the plenteous dinner, strong carouse and drinking?

 

Yet O my soul supreme!

Knowist thou the joys of pensive thought?

Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?

Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering

and the struggle?

The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day

or night?

Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space?

Prophetic joys of better, loftier love’s ideals, the divine wife,

the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade?

Joys all thine own undying one, joys worthy thee O soul.

 

O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,

To meet life as a powerful conqueror,

No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,

To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving

my interior soul impregnable,

And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

 

For not life’s joys alone I sing, repeating—the joy of death!

The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments,

for reasons,

Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn’d, or render’d

to powder, or buried,

My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,

My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications,

further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

 

O to attract by more than attraction!

How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none

of the rest,

It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws.

 

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!

To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!

To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!

To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with

perfect nonchalance!

To be indeed a God!

 

O to sail to sea in a ship!

To leave this steady unendurable land,

To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the

houses,

To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,

To sail and sail and sail!

 

O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!

To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!

To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,

A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)

A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

 

[BOOK XII]

 

} Song of the Broad-Axe

 

1

Weapon shapely, naked, wan,

Head from the mother’s bowels drawn,

Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,

Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,

Resting the grass amid and upon,

To be lean’d and to lean on.

 

Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades,

sights and sounds.

Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music,

Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ.

 

2

Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind,

Welcome are lands of pine and oak,

Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,

Welcome are lands of gold,

Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the grape,

Welcome are lands of sugar and rice,

Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato and

sweet potato,

Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies,

Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings,

Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming soil of

orchards, flax, honey, hemp;

Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,

Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,

Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores,

Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc,

Lands of iron—lands of the make of the axe.

 

3

The log at the woodpile, the axe supported by it,

The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space clear’d for garden,

The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is lull’d,

The walling and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,

The thought of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam ends,

and the cutting away of masts,

The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion’d houses and barns,

The remember’d print or narrative, the voyage at a venture of men,

families, goods,

The disembarkation, the founding of a new city,

The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it, the outset

anywhere,

The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa, Willamette,

The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddle-bags;

The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons,

The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men with their clear untrimm’d faces,

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves,

The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the boundless

impatience of restraint,

The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types, the

solidification;

The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard schooners and

sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,

Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods, stripes of

snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,

The glad clear sound of one’s own voice, the merry song, the natural

life of the woods, the strong day’s work,

The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the

bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-skin;

The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,

The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,

The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them

regular,

Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they

were prepared,

The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their

curv’d limbs,

Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on by

posts and braces,

The hook’d arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,

The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail’d,

Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,

The echoes resounding through the vacant building:

The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,

The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully

bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam,

The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands rapidly

laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear,

The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the

trowels striking the bricks,

The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its place,

and set with a knock of the trowel-handle,

The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the

steady replenishing by the hod-men;

Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices,

The swing of their axes on the square-hew’d log shaping it toward

the shape of a mast,

The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,

The butter-color’d chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,

The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes,

The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats,

stays against the sea;

The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the

close-pack’d square,

The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring,

The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line,

the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,

The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets, the bringing to bear of the

hooks and ladders and their execution,

The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors

if the fire smoulders under them,

The crowd with their lit faces watching, the glare and dense shadows;

The forger at his forge-furnace and the user of iron after him,

The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and temperer,

The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel and trying the

edge with his thumb,

The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in the socket;

The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,

The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,

The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice,

The Roman lictors preceding the consuls,

The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,

The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted head,

The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and foe

thither,

The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,

The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce

and parley,

The sack of an old city in its time,

The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,

Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,

Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the

gripe of brigands,

Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despairing,

The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,

The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust,

The power of personality just or unjust.

 

4

Muscle and pluck forever!

What invigorates life invigorates death,

And the dead advance as much as the living advance,

And the future is no more uncertain than the present,

For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the

delicatesse of the earth and of man,

And nothing endures but personal qualities.

 

What do you think endures?

Do you think a great city endures?

Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the

best built steamships?

Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d’oeuvres of engineering,

forts, armaments?

 

Away! these are not to be cherish’d for themselves,

They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,

The show passes, all does well enough of course,

All does very well till one flash of defiance.

 

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city