Pensive, on her dead gazing, I heard the Mother of All, Desperate, on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battle-fields gazing; (As the last gun ceased but the scent of the powder-smoke linger'd;)...
Come, my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready; Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!
You just maturing youth! You male or female! Remember the organic compact of These States, Remember the pledge of the Old Thirteen thenceforward to the rights, life, liberty, equality of man,...
O to make the most jubilant poem! Even to set off these, and merge with these, the carols of Death. O full of music! full of manhood, womanhood, infancy! Full of common employments! full of grain and trees. ...
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for; But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,...
A batter'd, wreck'd old man, Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home, Pent by the sea, and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months, Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken'd, and nigh to death,...
Primeval my love for the woman I love, O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the thought of you! Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,...
Proud music of the storm! Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains! Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras!...
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither, Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me, Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess'd soul, eludes not,...
Race of veterans! Race of victors! Race of the soil, ready for conflict! race of the conquering march! (No more credulity's race, abiding-temper'd race;) Race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself;...
Recorders ages hence! Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior I will tell you what to say of me; Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,...
Respondez! Respondez! (The war is completed the price is paid the title is settled beyond recall;) Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!...
Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer sweep! Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour'd what the earth gave me; Long I roam'd the woods of the north long I watch'd Niagara pouring;...
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
Roots and leaves themselves alone are these; Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods, and from the pond-side, Breast-sorrel and pinks of love--fingers that wind around tighter than vines,...
O take my hand, Walt Whitman! Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds! Such join'd unended links, each hook'd to the next! Each answering all each sharing the earth with all. ...