Works

Joy! shipmate - joy!
(Pleas'd to my Soul at death I cry;)
Our life is closed - our life begins;
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last - she leaps!...

Who includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,...

Laws for Creations,
For strong artists and leaders - for fresh broods of teachers, and perfect literats for America,
For noble savans, and coming musicians.
...

A song of the good green grass!
A song no more of the city streets;
A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields.

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork;...

There are who teach only the sweet lessons of peace and safety;
But I teach lessons of war and death to those I love,
That they readily meet invasions, when they come.

Locations and times - what is it in me that meets them all, whenever and wherever, and makes me at home?
Forms, colors, densities, odors - what is it in me that corresponds with them?

O magnet-south! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!...

Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me - O if I could but obtain knowledge!...

Long, too long, O land,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful, you learn'd from joys and prosperity only;
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish--advancing, grappling with direst fate, and recoiling not;...

Look down, fair moon, and bathe this scene;
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;
On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,...

Lo! Victress on the peaks!
Where thou, with mighty brow, regarding the world,
(The world, O Libertad, that vainly conspired against thee;)
Out of its countless beleaguering toils, after thwarting them all;...

Manhattan's streets I saunter'd, pondering,
On time, space, reality - on such as these, and abreast with them, prudence.

After all, the last explanation remains to be made about prudence;...

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;...

They shall arise in the States,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness;
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos;
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive;...

Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all, or mistress of all - aplomb in the midst of irrational things,
Imbued as they - passive, receptive, silent as they,...

Why! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,...

I see the sleeping babe, nestling the breast of its mother;
The sleeping mother and babe-hush'd, I study them long and long.

In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix'd house,
It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;
Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories?...

Myself and mine gymnastic ever,
To stand the cold or heat - to take good aim with a gun - to sail a boat - to manage horses - to beget superb children,...

Native moments! when you come upon me - Ah you are here now!
Give me now libidinous joys only!
Give me the drench of my passions!
Give me life coarse and rank! To-day,...