Poems By Walt Whitman Part 2

In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women exist; but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages are worthy the grand idea,--to them it is confided, and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it. The att.i.tude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them a while, and, though they neither speak nor advise, you shall learn the faithful American lesson. Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingrat.i.tude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat--the enemy triumphs--the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote, and lead-b.a.l.l.s, do their work--the cause is asleep--the strong throats are choked with their own blood--the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pa.s.s each other ... and is liberty gone out of that place? No, never. When liberty goes, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go: it waits for all the rest to go--it is the last. When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away--when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators--when the boys are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and traitors instead--when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people-- when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung with compa.s.sion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no man master--and when we are elated with n.o.ble joy at the sight of slaves-- when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority--when those in all parts of these states who could easier realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]--when the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no-- when it is better to be a bound b.o.o.by and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart--and when servility by town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape--or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth--then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

[Footnote 1: This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here reproduced _verbatim_ from the American edition.]

As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts are showered over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile light--also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many- fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty: the multiplication-table its--old age its--the carpenter's trade its--the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty--the American circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from its need, and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say, shall not realise or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the library is not he who holds a legal t.i.tle to it, having bought and paid for it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity and maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American states, strong and healthy and accomplished, shall receive no pleasure from violations of natural models, and must not permit them. In paintings or mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood, or in the ill.u.s.trations of books or newspapers, or in any comic or tragic prints, or in the patterns of woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or to put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially, it is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work, nothing _outre_ can be allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed that conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without ornament.

Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous children are conceived only in those communities where the models of natural forms are public every day. Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told, there is no more need of romances.

The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and by the justification of perfect personal candour. Then folks echo a new cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains. How beautiful is candour! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candour.

Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world, and that there is no single exception, and that never since our earth gathered itself in a ma.s.s has deceit or subterfuge or prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a shade--and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and despised--and that the soul has never been once fooled and never can be fooled--and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid puff--and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any part of ethereal s.p.a.ce, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes, nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.

Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs-- these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned, and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you pa.s.s or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or navete, and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the reached kisses of the soul. Still the right explanation remains to be made about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom s.p.a.ced out by ages, and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself--all else has reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in a day or a month, or any part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death, but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one name of word or deed--not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers-- not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder--no serpentine poison of those that seduce women--not the foolish yielding of women--not of the attainment of gain by discreditable means--not any nastiness of appet.i.te-- not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to sons, or sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their boys--not of greedy looks or malignant wishes--nor any of the wiles practised by people upon themselves--ever is or ever can be stamped on the programme, but it is duly realised and returned, and that returned in further performances, and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason, whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary--to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is well--if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same--if the President or chief justice is wise, it is the same--if the young mechanic or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. The interest will come round--all will come round. All the best actions of war and peace--all help given to relatives and strangers, and the poor and old and sorrowful, and young children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons--all furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves--all the self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take the seats of the boats--all offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a friend's sake or opinion's sake--all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by their neighbours--all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of mothers--all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded--all the grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we inherit--and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient nations unknown to us by name or date or location--all that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no--all that has at any time been well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands--and all that is well thought or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here--or that is henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any one--these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inured now, and will inure always, to the ident.i.ties from which they sprung or shall spring. Did you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist-- no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist--no result exists now without being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest mentionable spot coining a bit nearer the beginning than any other spot.... Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present, matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement--knows that the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning--and that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to prefer long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect a.s.suredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries nor avoids death.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides-- and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the pa.s.sage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his development.... Still, the final test of poems or any character or work remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through them? Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him?

and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old think of him?

A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realise and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring-- he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattained. Thenceforward is no rest: they see the s.p.a.ce and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums.

The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself, and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through the ceaseless rings, and shall never be quiet again.

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a while--perhaps a generation or two,--dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place--the gangs of kosmos and prophets _en ma.s.se_ shall take their place. A new order shall arise; and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future.

They shall not deign to defend immortality, or G.o.d, or the perfection of things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.

The English language befriends the grand American expression--it is brawny enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who, through all change of circ.u.mstance, was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance--it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and melancholy races, and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality, friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.

No great literature, nor any like style of behaviour or oratory or social intercourse or household arrangements or public inst.i.tutions, or the treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail, or detail of the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation, or courts or police, or tuition or architecture, or songs or amus.e.m.e.nts, or the costumes of young men, can long elude the jealous and pa.s.sionate instinct of American standards. Whether or no the sign appears from the mouths of the people, it throbs a live interrogation in every freeman's and freewoman's heart after that which pa.s.ses by, or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my country? Are its disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the ever-growing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well united, proud beyond the old models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown fresh out of the fields, or drawn from the sea, for use to me, to-day, here? I know that what answers for me, an American, must answer for any individual or nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this answer? or is it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the needs of the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of pleasure overlaid by modern science and forms? Does this acknowledge liberty with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at nought, for life and death? Will it help breed one good-shaped man, and a woman to be his perfect and independent mate? Does it improve manners? Is it for the nursing of the young of the republic? Does it solve readily with the sweet milk of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the mother of many children? Has it too the old, ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality? Does it look with the same love on the last-born and on those hardening toward stature, and on the errant, and on those who disdain all strength of a.s.sault outside of their own?

The poems distilled from other poems will probably pa.s.s away. The coward will surely pa.s.s away. The expectation of the vital and great can only be satisfied by the demeanour of the vital and great. The swarms of the polished, deprecating, and reflectors, and the polite, float off and leave no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite--they are not unappreciated--they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pa.s.s on it--no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is true, the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

[Script: Meantime, dear friend, Farewell, Walt Whitman.]

_CHANTS DEMOCRATIC._

_STARTING FROM PAUMANOK._

1.

Starting from fish-shape Paumanok,[1] where I was born, Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect mother; After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements; Dweller in Mannahatta,[2] city of ships, my city,--or on southern savannas; Or a soldier camped, or carrying my knapsack and gun--or a miner in California; Or rude in my home in Dakotah's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring; Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess, Far from the clank of crowds, intervals pa.s.sing, rapt and happy; Aware of the fresh free giver, the flowing Missouri--aware of mighty Niagara Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains--the hirsute and strong- breasted bull; Of earths, rocks, fifth-month flowers, experienced--stars, rain, snow, my amaze; Having studied the mocking-bird's tones, and the mountain hawk's, And heard at dusk the unrivalled one, the hermit thrush, from the swamp-cedars, Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

2.

Victory, union, faith, ident.i.ty, time, Yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.

This, then, is life; Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

How curious! how real!

Under foot the divine soil--over head the sun.

See, revolving, the globe; The ancestor-continents, away, grouped together; The present and future continents, north and south, with the isthmus between.

See, vast trackless s.p.a.ces; As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill; Countless ma.s.ses debouch upon them; They are now covered with the foremost people, arts, inst.i.tutions, known.

See, projected through time, For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend--they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions; One generation playing its part, and pa.s.sing on, Another generation playing its part, and pa.s.sing on in its turn, With faces turned sideways or backward towards me, to listen, With eyes retrospective towards me.

3.

Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian; Foremost! century marches! Libertad! ma.s.ses!

For you a programme of chants.

Chants of the prairies; Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican Sea; Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equidistant, Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless, to vivify all.

4.

In the Year 80 of the States,[3]

My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance, (Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.)

I harbour, for good or bad--I permit to speak, at every hazard-- Nature now without check, with original energy.

5.

Take my leaves, America! take them South, and take them North!

Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring; Surround them, East and West! for they would surround you; And you precedents! connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you.

I conned old times; I sat studying at the feet of the great masters: Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me!

In the name of these States, shall I scorn the antique?

Why, these are the children of the antique, to justify it.

6.

Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, Language-shapers on other sh.o.r.es, Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted hither: I have perused it--own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it;) Think nothing can ever be greater--nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves; Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place, with my own day, here.

Here lands female and male; Here the heirship and heiress-ship of the world--here the flame of materials; Here spirituality, the translatress, the openly-avowed, The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms; The satisfier, after due long-waiting, now advancing, Yes, here comes my mistress, the Soul.

7.