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

breakers tirelessly tossing,

I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,

Listen’d long and long.

 

Listen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,

Following you my brother.

 

Soothe! soothe! soothe!

Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,

And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,

But my love soothes not me, not me.

 

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,

It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

 

O madly the sea pushes upon the land,

With love, with love.

 

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

 

Loud! loud! loud!

Loud I call to you, my love!

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,

Surely you must know who is here, is here,

You must know who I am, my love.

 

Low-hanging moon!

What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?

O it is the shape, the shape of my mate.’

O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

 

Land! land! O land!

Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again

if you only would,

For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

 

O rising stars!

Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

 

O throat! O trembling throat!

Sound clearer through the atmosphere!

Pierce the woods, the earth,

Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

 

Shake out carols!

Solitary here, the night’s carols!

Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols!

Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!

O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!

O reckless despairing carols.

 

But soft! sink low!

Soft! let me just murmur,

And do you wait a moment you husky-nois’d sea,

For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,

So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,

But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

 

Hither my love!

Here I am! here!

With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you,

This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

 

Do not be decoy’d elsewhere,

That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,

That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,

Those are the shadows of leaves.

 

O darkness! O in vain!

O I am very sick and sorrowful

 

O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!

O troubled reflection in the sea!

O throat! O throbbing heart!

And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

 

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

In the air, in the woods, over fields,

Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!

But my mate no more, no more with me!

We two together no more.

 

The aria sinking,

All else continuing, the stars shining,

The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,

With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,

On the sands of Paumanok’s shore gray and rustling,

The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of

the sea almost touching,

The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the

atmosphere dallying,

The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously

bursting,

The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,

The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,

The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,

The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,

To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,

To the outsetting bard.

 

Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)

Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?

For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,

Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,

And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder

and more sorrowful than yours,

A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

 

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,

O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,

Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,

Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,

Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what

there in the night,

By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,

The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,

The unknown want, the destiny of me.

 

O give me the clue! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)

O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

 

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)

The word final, superior to all,

Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen;

Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?

Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

 

Whereto answering, the sea,

Delaying not, hurrying not,

Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,

Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,

And again death, death, death, death

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,

But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,

Death, death, death, death, death.

 

Which I do not forget.

But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,

That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,

With the thousand responsive songs at random,

My own songs awaked from that hour,

And with them the key, the word up from the waves,

The word of the sweetest song and all songs,

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet

garments, bending aside,)

The sea whisper’d me.

 

} As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

 

1

As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,

As I wended the shores I know,

As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,

Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,

Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,

I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,

Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,

Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,

The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land

of the globe.

 

Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those

slender windrows,

Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,

Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,

Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,

Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,

These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,

As I wended the shores I know,

As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.

 

2

As I wend to the shores I know not,

As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,

As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,

As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,

I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,

A few sands and dead leaves to gather,

Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

 

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,

Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have

not once had the least idea who or what I am,

But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet

untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,

Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,

With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,

Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

 

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single

object, and that no man ever can,

Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon

me and sting me,

Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

 

3

You oceans both, I close with you,

We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,

These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.

 

You friable shore with trails of debris,

You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,

What is yours is mine my father.

 

I too Paumanok,

I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been

wash’d on your shores,

I too am but a trail of drift and debris,

I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.

 

I throw myself upon your breast my father,

I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,

I hold you so firm till you answer me something.

 

Kiss me my father,

Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,

Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.

 

4

Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)

Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,

Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,

Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or

gather from you.

 

I mean tenderly by you and all,

I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead,

and following me and mine.

 

Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,

Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,

(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,

See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)

Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,

Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,

From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,

Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,

Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,

A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating,

drifted at random,

Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,

Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,

We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,

You up there walking or sitting,

Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

 

} Tears

 

Tears! tears! tears!

In the night, in solitude, tears,

On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand,

Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,

Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;

O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?

What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?

Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;

O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!

O wild and dismal night storm, with wind—O belching and desperate!

O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and

regulated pace,

But away at night as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosen’d ocean,

Of tears! tears! tears!

 

} To the Man-of-War-Bird

 

Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,

Waking renew’d on thy prodigious pinions,

(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st,

And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)

Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating,

As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee,

(Myself a speck, a point on the world’s