#AmericanWriters #XIXCentury #1855 #LeavesOfGrass
I see before me now a traveling ar… Below a fertile valley spread, wit… Behind, the terraced sides of a mo… Broken, with rocks, with clinging… The numerous camp-fires scatter’d…
If I should need to name, O West… and show, ’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor y… huge rifts of canyons, Colorado, Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone…
Earth, round, rolling, compact—sun… words to be said; Watery, vegetable, sauroid advance… of the future, Behold! these are vast words to be…
What may we chant, O thou within… What tablets, outlines, hang for t… The life thou lived’st we know not… But that thou walk’dst thy years i… Nor heroism thine, nor war, nor gl…
Year of meteors! brooding year! I would bind in words retrospectiv… I would sing your contest for the… I would sing how an old man, tall,… scaffold in Virginia,
Now I tell what I knew in Texas… (I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall o… The hundred and fifty are dumb yet… ’Tis the tale of the murder in col…
As I watch’d the ploughman plough… Or the sower sowing in the fields,… I saw there too, O life and death… (Life, life is the tillage, and D…
This latent mine—these unlaunch’d… Wrath, argument, or praise, or com… (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois… These ocean waves arousable to fur… Or sooth’d to ease and sheeny sun…
I doubt it not—then more, far more… In each old song bequeath’d—in eve… (Different—something unreck’d befo… In every object, mountain, tree, a… As part of each—evolv’d from each—…
Over and through the burial chant, Organ and solemn service, sermon,… To me come interpolation sounds no… crowding up the aisle and from the… Of sudden battle’s hurry and harsh…
Out from behind this bending rough… These lights and shades, this dram… This common curtain of the face co… you, in each for each, (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tea…
As I walk these broad majestic da… (For the war, the struggle of bloo… Against vast odds erewhile having… Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps… Perhaps to engage in time in still…
Have you learn’d lessons only of t… tender with you, and stood aside f… Have you not learn’d great lessons… themselves against you? or who tre… the passage with you?
Come, I will make the continent i… I will make the most splendid race… I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life—long love of comrade…
O TO make the most jubilant poem! Even to set off these, and merge w… O full of music! full of manhood,… Full of common employments! full o… O for the voices of animals! O fo…