The Complete Works of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walt Whitman
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Языкознание
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isbn: 4064066058128
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of the lands did you wait for your poet?

       Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand?

       Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,

       Exulting words, words to Democracy’s lands.

      Interlink’d, food-yielding lands!

       Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!

       Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple

       and the grape!

       Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of

       those sweet-air’d interminable plateaus!

       Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!

       Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west

       Colorado winds!

       Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware!

       Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!

       Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and

       Connecticut!

       Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks!

       Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen’s land!

       Inextricable lands! the clutch’d together! the passionate ones!

       The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb’d!

       The great women’s land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and

       the inexperienced sisters!

       Far breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d! the diverse! the

       compact!

       The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!

       O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any

       rate include you all with perfect love!

       I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any sooner than another!

       O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this hour with

       irrepressible love,

       Walking New England, a friend, a traveler,

       Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on

       Paumanok’s sands,

       Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwelling in every town,

       Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,

       Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls,

       Of and through the States as during life, each man and woman my neighbor,

       The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,

       The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet with any of them,

       Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my house of adobie,

       Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in Maryland,

       Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and ice welcome to me,

       Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the

       Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,

       Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every

       new brother,

       Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they

       unite with the old ones,

       Coming among the new ones myself to be their companion and equal,

       coming personally to you now,

       Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

      15

       With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on.

       For your life adhere to me,

       (I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give

       myself really to you, but what of that?

       Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

      No dainty dolce affettuoso I,

       Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived,

       To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,

       For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

      16

       On my way a moment I pause,

       Here for you! and here for America!

       Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States I

       harbinge glad and sublime,

       And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

      The red aborigines,

       Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds

       and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,

       Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee,

       Kaqueta, Oronoco,

       Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,

       Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the

       water and the land with names.

      17

       Expanding and swift, henceforth,

       Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious,

       A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,

       A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests,

       New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

      These, my voice announcing — I will sleep no more but arise,

       You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you,

       fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

      18

       See, steamers steaming through my poems,

       See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing,

       See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat,

       the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village,

       See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea,

       how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores,

       See, pastures and forests in my poems — see, animals wild and tame — see,

       beyond the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo feeding on short curly grass,

       See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets,

       with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,

       See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press — see, the electric

       telegraph stretching across the continent,

       See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching,

       pulses of Europe duly return’d,

       See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing

       the steam-whistle,

       See, ploughmen ploughing farms — see, miners digging mines — see,

       the numberless factories,

       See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools — see from among