Publisher: Poemhunter com The World's Poetry Archive

625
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second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go--it is the last.
When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,
And when all life, and all the souls of men and women are discharged
from any part of the earth,
Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty, be discharged from
that part of the earth,
And the infidel come into full possession.
Then courage! European revolter! revoltress! 30
For, till all ceases, neither must you cease.
I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself,
nor what anything is for,)
But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd,
In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment--for they too are
great.
Revolt! and the bullet for tyrants!
Did we think victory great?
So it is--But now it seems to me, when it cannot be help'd, that
defeat is great,
And that death and dismay are great.
Walt Whitman
626
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To A Historian
YOU who celebrate bygones!
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races--the life
that has exhibited itself;
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates,
rulers and priests;
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself,
in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the
great pride of man in himself;)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.
Walt Whitman
627
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To A Locomotive In Winter
THEE for my recitative!
Thee in the driving storm, even as now--the snow--the winter-day
declining;
Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat
convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,
shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar--now tapering in the
distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix'd in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame--thy springs and valves--the tremulous twinkle of
thy wheels; 10
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the
continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see
thee,
With storm, and buffeting gusts of wind, and falling snow;
By day, thy warning, ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night, thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps
at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an
earthquake, rousing all! 20
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding;
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd,
Launch'd o'er the prairies wide--across the lakes,
To the free skies, unpent, and glad, and strong.
Walt Whitman
628
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To A President
ALL you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,
You have not learn'd of Nature--of the politics of Nature, you have
not learn'd the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality;
You have not seen that only such as they are for These States,
And that what is less than they, must sooner or later lift off from
These States.
Walt Whitman