Publisher: Poemhunter com The World's Poetry Archive

692
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O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I
loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands -- and this for his dear
sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
Walt Whitman
693
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Whispers Of Heavenly Death
WHISPERS of heavenly death, murmur'd I hear;
Labial gossip of night--sibilant chorals;
Footsteps gently ascending--mystical breezes, wafted soft and low;
Ripples of unseen rivers--tides of a current, flowing, forever
flowing;
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human
tears?)
I see, just see, skyward, great cloud-masses;
Mournfully, slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing;
With, at times, a half-dimm'd, sadden'd, far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.
(Some parturition, rather--some solemn, immortal birth: 10
On the frontiers, to eyes impenetrable,
Some Soul is passing over.)
Walt Whitman
694
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Who Is Now Reading This?
May-be one is now reading this who knows some wrong-doing of my past
life,
Or may-be a stranger is reading this who has secretly loved me,
Or may-be one who meets all my grand assumptions and egotisms with
derision,
Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.
As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Or as if I never deride myself! (O conscience-struck! O self-
convicted!)
Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly, a long time,
and never avow it;)
Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in myself, the stuff
of wrong-doing,
Or as if it could cease transpiring from me until it must cease. 10
Walt Whitman
695
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Who Learns My Lesson Complete?
WHO learns my lesson complete?
Boss, journeyman, apprentice--churchman and atheist,
The stupid and the wise thinker--parents and offspring--merchant,
clerk, porter and customer,
Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy--Draw nigh and commence;
It is no lesson--it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
And that to another, and every one to another still.
The great laws take and effuse without argument;
I am of the same style, for I am their friend,
I love them quits and quits--I do not halt, and make salaams.
I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the reasons
of things; 10
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen.
I cannot say to any person what I hear--I cannot say it to myself--it
is very wonderful.
It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so
exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt, or the
untruth of a single second;
I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years,
nor ten billions of years,
Nor plann'd and built one thing after another, as an architect plans
and builds a house.
I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,
Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,
Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.
Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal;
I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and how
I was conceived in my mother's womb is equally wonderful; 20
And pass'd from a babe, in the creeping trance of a couple of summers
and winters, to articulate and walk--All this is equally
wonderful.