Publisher: Poemhunter com The World's Poetry Archive

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To Old Age
I SEE in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as
it pours in the great Sea.
Walt Whitman
635
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To One Shortly To Die
FROM all the rest I single out you, having a message for you:
You are to die--Let others tell you what they please, I cannot
prevaricate,
I am exact and merciless, but I love you--There is no escape for you.
Softly I lay my right hand upon you--you just feel it,
I do not argue--I bend my head close, and half envelope it,
I sit quietly by--I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself, spiritual, bodily--that is
eternal--you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions! 10
Strong thoughts fill you, and confidence--you smile!
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines--you do not mind the weeping friends--I
am with you,
I exclude others from you--there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate--I congratulate you.
Walt Whitman
636
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To Oratists
TO ORATISTS--to male or female,
Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine power
to use words.
Are you full-lung'd and limber-lipp'd from long trial? from vigorous
practice? from physique?
Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?
Come duly to the divine power to use words?
For only at last, after many years--after chastity, friendship,
procreation, prudence, and nakedness;
After treading ground and breasting river and lake;
After a loosen'd throat--after absorbing eras, temperaments, races--
after knowledge, freedom, crimes;
After complete faith--after clarifyings, elevations, and removing
obstructions;
After these, and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a
woman, the divine power to use words. 10
Then toward that man or that woman, swiftly hasten all--None refuse,
all attend;
Armies, ships, antiquities, the dead, libraries, paintings, machines,
cities, hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration,
form in close ranks;
They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the mouth
of that man, or that woman.
.... O I see arise orators fit for inland America;
And I see it is as slow to become an orator as to become a man;
And I see that all power is folded in a great vocalism.
Of a great vocalism, the merciless light thereof shall pour, and the
storm rage,
Every flash shall be a revelation, an insult,
The glaring flame on depths, on heights, on suns, on stars,
On the interior and exterior of man or woman, 20
On the laws of Nature--on passive materials,
On what you called death--(and what to you therefore was death,
As far as there can be death.)
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Walt Whitman
638
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To Rich Givers
WHAT you give me, I cheerfully accept,
A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money--these, as I
rendezvous with my poems;
A traveler's lodging and breakfast as I journey through The States--
Why should I be ashamed to own such gifts? Why to advertise for
them?
For I myself am not one who bestows nothing upon man and woman;
For I bestow upon any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of
the universe.
Walt Whitman