Leaves of Grass :[1891] Including Sands at Seventy...1st Annex, Good-Bye my Fancy...2d Annex, A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads, and Portrait from Life |
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TO THE LEAVEN'D SOIL THEY TROD. |
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 | Leaves of Grass :[1891] |  |
TO THE LEAVEN'D SOIL THEY TROD.
To the leaven'd soil they trod calling I sing for the last,(Forth from my tent emerging for good, loosing, untying the tent-ropes,)
In the freshness the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and vistas again to peace restored,
To the fiery fields emanative and the endless vistas beyond, to the South and the North,
To the leaven'd soil of the general Western world to attest my songs,
To the Alleghanian hills and the tireless Mississippi,
To the rocks I calling sing, and all the trees in the woods,
To the plains of the poems of heroes, to the prairies spreading wide,
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And responding they answer all, (but not in words,)
The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely,
The prairie draws me close, as the father to bosom broad the son,
The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end,
But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs.
| Leaves of Grass :[1891] | |