Book XVII. Birds Of Passage: France, the 18th Year of these States
A great year and place
A harsh discordant natal scream out-sounding, to touch the mother’s
heart closer than any yet.
I walk’d the shores of my Eastern sea,
Heard over the waves the little voice,
Saw the divine infant where she woke mournfully wailing, amid the roar
of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of falling buildings,
Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running, nor from the
single corpses, nor those in heaps, nor those borne away in the
tumbrils,
Was not so desperate at the battues of death—was not so shock’d at the
repeated fusillades of the guns.
Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?
Could I wish humanity different?
Could I wish the people made of wood and stone?
Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
O Liberty! O mate for me!
Here too the blaze, the grape-shot and the axe, in reserve, to fetch them
out in case of need,
Here too, though long represt, can never be destroy’d,
Here too could rise at last murdering and ecstatic,
Here too demanding full arrears of vengeance.
Hence I sign this salute over the sea,
And I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism,
But remember the little voice that I heard wailing, and wait with perfect
trust, no matter how long,
And from to-day sad and cogent I maintain the bequeath’d cause, as for
all lands,
And I send these words to Paris with my love,
And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them,
For I guess there is latent music yet in France, floods of it,
O I hear already the bustle of instruments, they will soon be drowning
all that would interrupt them,
O I think the east wind brings a triumphal and free march,
It reaches hither, it swells me to Joyful madness,
I will run transpose it in words, to justify
I will yet sing a song for you ma femme.
Otras obras de Walt Whitman...
