The Complete Works of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman

at my window, door,

       Thou, laving, tempering all, cool-freshing, gently vitalizing

       Me, old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat;

       Thou, nestling, folding close and firm yet soft, companion better

       than talk, book, art,

       (Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the

       rest — and this is of them,)

       So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within — thy soothing fingers

       my face and hands,

       Thou, messenger — magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me,

       (Distances balk’d — occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot,)

       I feel the sky, the prairies vast — I feel the mighty northern lakes,

       I feel the ocean and the forest — somehow I feel the globe itself

       swift-swimming in space;

       Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone — haply from endless store,

       God-sent,

       (For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense,)

       Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and

       cannot tell,

       Art thou not universal concrete’s distillation? Law’s, all

       Astronomy’s last refinement?

       Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?

Old Chants

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      An ancient song, reciting, ending,

       Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All,

       Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee,

       Accept me, thou saidst, the elder ballads,

       And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.

      (Of many debts incalculable,

       Haply our New World’s chieftest debt is to old poems.)

      Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,

       Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,

       The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,

       The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,

       The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,

       Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,

       The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,

       The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,

       Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,

       The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays,

       Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,

       As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,

       The great shadowy groups gathering around,

       Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,

       Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand

       and word, ascending,

       Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent

       with their music,

       Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,

       Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.

A Christmas Greeting

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      Welcome, Brazilian brother — thy ample place is ready;

       A loving hand — a smile from the north — a sunny instant hall!

       (Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,

       impedimentas,

       Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the acceptance and

       the faith;)

       To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck — to thee from us