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

a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game,

Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.

 

The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,

My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.

 

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,

I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;

You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

 

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,

the bride was a red girl,

Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking,

they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets

hanging from their shoulders,

On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant

beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,

She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks

descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.

 

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,

I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,

Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,

And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,

And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,

And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some

coarse clean clothes,

And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,

And remember putting piasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;

He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,

I had him sit next me at table, my firelock lean’d in the corner.

 

11

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;

Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

 

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,

She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

 

Which of the young men does she like the best?

Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

 

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

 

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,

The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

 

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,

Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

 

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

 

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the

sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray.

 

12

The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife

at the stall in the market,

I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.

 

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,

Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in

the fire.

 

From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,

The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,

Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

 

13

The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags

underneath on its tied-over chain,

The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and

tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece,

His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over

his hip-band,

His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat

away from his forehead,

The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of

his polish’d and perfect limbs.

 

I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,

I go with the team also.

 

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as

forward sluing,

To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,

Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

 

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what

is that you express in your eyes?

It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

 

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and

day-long ramble,

They rise together, they slowly circle around.

 

I believe in those wing’d purposes,

And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,

And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,

And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,

And the in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

 

14

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,

Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,

The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,

Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

 

The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the

chickadee, the prairie-dog,

The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,

The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,

I see in them and myself the same old law.

 

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,

They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

 

I am enamour’d of growing out-doors,

Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,

Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and

mauls, and the drivers of horses,

I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

 

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,

Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,

Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,

Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,

Scattering it freely forever.

 

15

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,

The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane

whistles its wild ascending lisp,

The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,

The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,

The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,

The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,

The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,

The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,

The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and

looks at the oats and rye,

The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,

(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s

bedroom;)

The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,

He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;

The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail;

The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by

the bar-room stove,

The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat,

the gate-keeper marks who pass,

The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do

not know him;)

The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,

The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their

rifles, some sit on logs,

Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;

The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,

As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them

from his saddle,

The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their

partners, the dancers bow to each other,

The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the

musical rain,

The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,

The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and

bead-bags for sale,

The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut

eyes bent sideways,

As the deckhands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for

the shore-going passengers,

The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it

off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,

The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne

her first child,

The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the

factory or mill,

The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead

flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering

with blue and gold,

The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his

desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,

The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,

The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,

The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white

sails sparkle!)

The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,

The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling

about the odd cent;)

The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock

moves slowly,

The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips,

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and

pimpled neck,

The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to

each other,

(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)

The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great

Secretaries,

On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,

The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,

The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,

As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the

jingling of loose change,

The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the

roof, the masons are calling for mortar,

In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;

Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it

is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)

Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows,

and the winter-grain falls in the ground;

Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in

the frozen surface,

The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep

with his axe,

Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cottonwood or pecan-trees,

Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through

those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,

Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,

Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons

around them,

In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after

their day’s sport,

The city sleeps and the country sleeps,

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