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

them that like,

I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,

Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!

 

I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning every

one I meet,

Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?

Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

 

(With pangs and cries as thine own O bearer of many children,

These clamors wild to a race of pride I give.)

 

O lands, would you be freer than all that has ever been before?

If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen to me.

 

Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,

Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey—juice,

Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,

Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men.

 

5

Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials,

America brings builders, and brings its own styles.

 

The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and

pass’d to other spheres,

A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

 

America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all

hazards,

Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use

of precedents,

Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under

their forms,

Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne

from the house,

Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was

fittest for its days,

That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who

approaches,

And that he shall be fittest for his days.

 

Any period one nation must lead,

One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

 

These States are the amplest poem,

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,

Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the

day and night,

Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,

Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves,

Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the

soul loves.

 

6

Land of lands and bards to corroborate!

Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face,

To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d both mother’s and father’s,

His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,

Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,

Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,

Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with

incomparable love,

Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,

Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,

Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,

Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,

Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,

If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he

stretching with them North or South,

Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between them,

Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock,

live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,

Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,

He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with

northern transparent ice,

Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,

Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the

fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,

His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit, unclosed to good and evil,

Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times,

Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,

Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle,

The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of

the Constitution,

The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,

The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable,

The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,

hunters, trappers,

Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the

gestation of new States,

Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming

up from the uttermost parts,

Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially

the young men,

Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they

have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the

presence of superiors,

The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and

decision of their phrenology,

The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when wrong’d,

The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,

good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,

The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,

The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement

of the population,

The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,

Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points,

Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,

Northwest, Southwest,

Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,

Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the

ruins of all the rest,

On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours

be the stake, and respite no more.

 

7

(Lo, high toward heaven, this day,

Libertad, from the conqueress’ field return’d,

I mark the new aureola around your head,

No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,

With war’s flames and the lambent lightnings playing,

And your port immovable where you stand,

With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch’d and lifted fist,

And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly

crush’d beneath you,

The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his

senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,

The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much,

To-day a carrion dead and damn’d, the despised of all the earth,

An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn’d.)

 

8

Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever

keeps vista,

Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,

O days of the future I believe in you—I isolate myself for your sake,

O America because you build for mankind I build for you,

O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision

and science,

Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.

(Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!

But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain,

pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)

 

9

I listened to the Phantom by Ontario’s shore,

I heard the voice arising demanding bards,

By them all native and grand, by them alone can these States be

fused into the compact organism of a Nation.

 

To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,

That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle,

as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants.

 

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most

need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest,

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their

poets shall.

 

(Soul of love and tongue of fire!

Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world!

Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?)

 

10

Of these States the poet is the equable man,

Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of

their full returns,

Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,

He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither

more nor less,

He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,

He is the equalizer of his age and land,

He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,

In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich,

thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,

commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,

immortality, government,

In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as

good as the engineer’s, he can make every word he speaks draw blood,

The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith,

He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,)

He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun failing round

helpless thing,

As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,

His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,

In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,

He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,

He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women

as dreams or dots.

 

For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,

For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,

The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.

 

Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,

They live in the feelings of young men and the best women,

(Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been always

ready to fall for Liberty.)

 

11

For the great Idea,

That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.

 

Songs of stern defiance ever ready,

Songs of the rapid arming and the march,

The flag of peace quick-folded, and instead the flag we know,

Warlike flag of the great Idea.

 

(Angry cloth I saw there leaping!

I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,

I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight—O the

hard-contested fight!

The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles—the hurtled balls scream,

The battle-front forms amid the smoke—the volleys pour incessant

from the line,

Hark, the ringing word Charge!—now the tussle and the furious

maddening yells,

Now the corpses tumble curl’d upon the ground,

Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,

Angry cloth I saw there leaping.)

 

12

Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in

the States?

The place is august, the terms obdurate.

 

Who would assume to teach here may well prepare himself body and mind,

He may well survey, ponder, arm, fortify, harden, make lithe himself,

He shall surely be question’d beforehand by me with many and stern questions.

 

Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?

Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?

Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,

pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?

Have you consider’d the organic compact of the first day of the

first year of Independence, sign’d by the Commissioners, ratified

by the States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?

Have you possess’d yourself of the Federal Constitution?

Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them,

and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?

Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea, the

bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?

Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?

Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,

fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the

whole People?

Are you not of some coterie? some school or mere religion?

Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to

life itself?

Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?

Have you too the old ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?

Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the

last-born? little and big? and for the errant?

 

What is this you bring my America?

Is it uniform with my country?

Is it not something that has been better told or done before?

Have you not imported this or the spirit of it