University of Virginia Library

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC AND NATIVE AMERICAN.

Apostroph.

O mother! O son!
O brood continental!
O flowers of the prairies!
O space boundless! O hum of mighty products!
O you teeming cities! O so invincible, turbulent, proud!
O race of the future! O women!
O fathers! O you men of passion and the storm!
O native power only! O beauty!
O yourself! O God! O divine average!
O you bearded roughs! O bards! O all those slumberers!
O arouse! the dawn-bird's throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?
O, as I walk'd the beach, I heard the mournful notes foreboding a tempest—the low, oft-repeated shriek of the diver, the long-lived loon;
O I heard, and yet hear, angry thunder;—O you sailors! O ships! make quick preparation!
O from his masterful sweep, the warning cry of the eagle!
(Give way there, all! It is useless! Give up your spoils;)
O sarcasms! Propositions! (O if the whole world should prove indeed a sham, a sell!)
O I believe there is nothing real but America and freedom!
O to sternly reject all except Democracy!
O imperator! O who dare confront you and me?
O to promulgate our own! O to build for that which builds for mankind!
O feuillage! O North! O the slope drained by the Mexican sea!
O all, all inseparable—ages, ages, ages!
O a curse on him that would dissever this Union for any reason whatever!
O climates, labors! O good and evil! O death!
O you strong with iron and wood! O Personality!
O the village or place which has the greatest man or woman! even if it be only a few ragged huts;
O the city where women walk in public processions in the streets, the same as the men;
O a wan and terrible emblem, by me adopted!
O shapes arising! shapes of the future centuries!
O muscle and pluck forever for me!
O workmen and workwomen forever for me!
O farmers and sailors! O drivers of horses forever for me!
O I will make the new bardic list of trades and tools!
O you coarse and wilful! I love you!
O South! O longings for my dear home! O soft and sunny airs!
O pensive! O I must return where the palm grows and the mocking-bird sings, or else I die!
O equality! O organic compacts! I am come to be your born poet!
O whirl, contest, sounding and resounding! I am your poet, because I am part of you;
O days by-gone! Enthusiasts! Antecedents!
O vast preparations for These States! O years!
O what is now being sent forward thousands of years to come!
O mediums! O to teach! to convey the invisible faith!
To promulge real things! to journey through all The States!
O creation! O to-day! O laws! O unmitigated adoration!
O for mightier broods of orators, artists, and singers!
O for native songs! carpenter's, boatman's, ploughman's songs! shoemaker's songs!
O haughtiest growth of time! O free and extatic!
O what I, here, preparing, warble for!
O you hastening light! O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling, and take his height—and you too will ascend;
O so amazing and so broad! up there resplendent, darting and burning;
O prophetic! O vision staggered with weight of light! with pouring glories!
O copious! O hitherto unequalled!
O Libertad! O compact! O union impossible to dissever!
O my Soul! O lips becoming tremulous, powerless!
O centuries, centuries yet ahead!
O voices of greater orators! I pause—I listen for you!
O you States! Cities! defiant of all outside authority! I spring at once into your arms! you I most love!
O you grand Presidentiads! I wait for you!
New history! New heroes! I project you!
Visions of poets! only you really last! O sweep on! sweep on!
O Death! O you striding there! O I cannot yet!
O heights! O infinitely too swift and dizzy yet!
O purged lumine! you threaten me more than I can stand!
O present! I return while yet I may to you!
O poets to come, I depend upon you!

[1. A nation announcing itself, (many in one,)]

[2. Broad-axe, shapely, naked, wan!]

[3. Come closer to me]

[4. America always!]

America always!
Always me joined with you, whoever you are!
Always our own feuillage!
Always Florida's green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!
Always California's golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New Mexico! Always soft-breath'd Cuba!
Always the vast slope drained by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes drained by the Eastern and Western Seas,
The area the Eighty-third year of These States—the three and a half millions of square miles,
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main—the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings—Always these and more, branching forth into numberless branches;
Always the free range and diversity! Always the continent of Democracy!
Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travellers, Kanada, the snows;
Always these compact lands—lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge oval lakes;
Always the West, with strong native persons—the increasing density there—the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
All sights, South, North, East—all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
All characters, movements, growths—a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,
Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering;
On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats wooding up;
Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware;
In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks, the hills—or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink;
In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the water, rocking silently;
In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done—they rest standing—they are too tired;
Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play around;
The hawk sailing where men have not yet sailed—the farthest polar sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes;
White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes;
On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight together;
In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding—the howl of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk;
In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake—in summer visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming;
In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree-tops,
Below, the red cedar, festooned with tylandria—the pines and cypresses, growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat;
Rude boats descending the big Pedee—climbing plants, parasites, with colored flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the wind;
The camp of Georgia wagoners, just after dark—the supper-fires, and the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
Thirty or forty great wagons—the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees—the flames—also the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and rising;
Southern fishermen fishing—the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's coast—the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery—the large sweep-seines—the windlasses on shore worked by horses—the clearing, curing, and packing houses;
Deep in the forest, in the piney woods, turpentine and tar dropping from the incisions in the trees—There is the turpentine distillery,
There are the negroes at work, in good health—the ground in all directions is covered with pine straw;
In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking;
In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse;
On rivers, boatmen safely moored at night-fall, in their boats, under the shelter of high banks,
Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking;
Late in the afternoon, the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the Great Dismal Swamp—there are the greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous moss, the cypress tree, and the juniper tree;
Northward, young men of Mannahatta—the target company from an excursion returning home at evening—the musket-muzzles all bear bunches of flowers presented by women;
Children at play—or on his father's lap a young boy fallen asleep, (how his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!)
The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the Mississippi—he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eye around;
California life—the miner, bearded, dressed in his rude costume—the stanch California friendship—the sweet air—the graves one, in passing, meets, solitary, just aside the horse-path;
Down in Texas, the cotton-field, the negro-cabins—drivers driving mules or oxen before rude carts—cotton-bales piled on banks and wharves;
Encircling all, vast-darting, up and wide, the American Soul, with equal hemispheres—one Love, one Dilation or Pride;
In arriere, the peace-talk with the Iroquois, the aborigines—the calumet, the pipe of good-will arbitration, and indorsement,
The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward the earth,
The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural exclamations,
The setting out of the war-party—the long and stealthy march,
The single file—the swinging hatchets—the surprise and slaughter of enemies;
All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of These States—reminiscences, all institutions,
All These States, compact—Every square mile of These States, without excepting a particle—you also—me also,
Me pleased, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok's fields,
Me, observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies, shuffling between each other, ascending high in the air;
The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects—the fall traveller southward, but returning northward early in the spring;
The country boy at the close of the day, driving the herd of cows, and shouting to them as they loiter to browse by the road-side;
The city wharf—Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, San Francisco,
The departing ships, when the sailors heave at the capstan;
Evening—me in my room—the setting sun,
The setting summer sun shining in my open window, showing me flies, suspended, balancing in the air in the centre of the room, darting athwart, up and down, casting swift shadows in specks on the opposite wall, where the shine is;
The athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners;
Males, females, immigrants, combinations—the copiousness—the individuality and sovereignty of The States, each for itself—the money-makers;
Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces—the windlass, lever, pulley—All certainties,
The certainty of space, increase, freedom, futurity,
In space, the sporades, the scattered islands, the stars—on the firm earth, the lands, my lands,
O lands! all so dear to me—what you are, (whatever it is,) I become a part of that, whatever it is,
Southward there, I screaming, with wings slow flapping, with the myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida—or in Louisiana, with pelicans breeding,
Otherways, there, atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the Rio Grande, the Nueces, the Brazos, the Tombigbee, the Red River, the Saskatchawan, or the Osage, I with the spring waters laughing and skipping and running;
Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Paumanok, I, with parties of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and aquatic plants;
Retreating, triumphantly twittering, the king-bird, from piercing the crow with its bill, for amusement—And I triumphantly twittering;
The migrating flock of wild geese alighting in autumn to refresh themselves—the body of the flock feed—the sentinels outside move around with erect heads watching, and are from time to time relieved by other sentinels—And I feeding and taking turns with the rest;
In Kanadian forests, the moose, large as an ox, cornered by hunters, rising desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with his fore-feet, the hoofs as sharp as knives—And I, plunging at the hunters, cornered and desperate;
In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, store-houses, and the countless workmen working in the shops,
And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof—and no less in myself than the whole of the Mannahatta in itself,
Singing the song of These, my ever united lands—my body no more inevitably united, part to part, and made one identity, any more than my lands are inevitably united, and made ONE IDENTITY,
Nativities, climates, the grass of the great Pastoral Plains,
Cities, labors, death, animals, products, good and evil—these me,
These affording, in all their particulars, endless feuillage to me and to America, how can I do less than pass the clew of the union of them, to afford the like to you?
Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you also be eligible as I am?
How can I but, as here, chanting, invite you for yourself to collect bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of These States?

[5. Respondez! Respondez!]

Respondez! Respondez!
Let every one answer! Let those who sleep be waked! Let none evade—not you, any more than others!
(If it really be as is pretended, how much longer must we go on with our affectations and sneaking?
Let me bring this to a close—I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles,)
Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was behind advance to the front and speak!
Let murderers, thieves, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!
Let the old propositions be postponed!
Let faces and theories be turned inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!
Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!
Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?)
Let trillions of men and women be mocked with bodies and mocked with Souls!
Let the love that waits in them, wait! Let it die, or pass still-born to other spheres!
Let the sympathy that waits in every man, wait! or let it also pass, a dwarf, to other spheres!
Let contradictions prevail! Let one thing contradict another! and let one line of my poems contradict another!
Let the people sprawl with yearning aimless hands! Let their tongues be broken! Let their eyes be discouraged! Let none descend into their hearts with the fresh lusciousness of love!
Let the theory of America be management, caste, comparison! (Say! what other theory would you?)
Let them that distrust birth and death lead the rest! (Say! why shall they not lead you?)
Let the crust of hell be neared and trod on! Let the days be darker than the nights! Let slumber bring less slumber than waking-time brings!
Let the world never appear to him or her for whom it was all made!
Let the heart of the young man exile itself from the heart of the old man! and let the heart of the old man be exiled from that of the young man!
Let the sun and moon go! Let scenery take the applause of the audience! Let there be apathy under the stars!
Let freedom prove no man's inalienable right! Every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!
Let none but infidels be countenanced!
Let the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust, be taken for granted above all! Let writers, judges, governments, households, religions, philosophies, take such for granted above all!
Let the worst men beget children out of the worst women!
Let priests still play at immortality!
Let Death be inaugurated!
Let nothing remain upon the earth except the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers, and learned and polite persons!
Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!
Let the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee—Let the mud-fish, the lobster, the mussel, eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-fish—Let these, and the like of these, be put on a perfect equality with man and woman!
Let churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those who have died of the most filthy of diseases!
Let marriage slip down among fools, and be for none but fools!
Let men among themselves talk and think obscenely of women! and let women among themselves talk and think obscenely of men!
Let every man doubt every woman! and let every woman trick every man!
Let us all, without missing one, be exposed in public, naked, monthly, at the peril of our lives! Let our bodies be freely handled and examined by whoever chooses!
Let nothing but copies, pictures, statues, reminiscences, elegant works, be permitted to exist upon the earth!
Let the earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be mentioned the name of God!
Let there be no God!
Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!
Let judges and criminals be transposed! Let the prison-keepers be put in prison! Let those that were prisoners take the keys! (Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?)
Let the slaves be masters! Let the masters become slaves!
Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! Let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!
Let the Asiatic, the African, the European, the American and the Australian, go armed against the murderous stealthiness of each other! Let them sleep armed! Let none believe in good-will!
Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! Let such be scorned and derided off from the earth!
Let a floating cloud in the sky—Let a wave of the sea—Let one glimpse of your eye-sight upon the landscape or grass—Let growing mint, spinach, onions, tomatoes—Let these be exhibited as shows at a great price for admission!
Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few smouchers! Let the few seize on what they choose! Let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!
Let shadows be furnished with genitals! Let substances be deprived of their genitals!
Let there be wealthy and immense cities—but through any of them, not a single poet, saviour, knower, lover!
Let the infidels of These States laugh all faith away! If one man be found who has faith, let the rest set upon him! Let them affright faith! Let them destroy the power of breeding faith!
Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! Let them dance on, while seeming lasts! (O seeming! seeming! seeming!)
Let the preachers recite creeds! Let them teach only what they have been taught!
Let the preachers of creeds never dare to go meditate candidly upon the hills, alone, by day or by night! (If one ever once dare, he is lost!)
Let insanity have charge of sanity!
Let books take the place of trees, animals, rivers, clouds!
Let the daubed portraits of heroes supersede heroes!
Let the manhood of man never take steps after itself! Let it take steps after eunuchs, and after consumptive and genteel persons!
Let the white person tread the black person under his heel! (Say! which is trodden under heel, after all?)
Let the reflections of the things of the world be studied in mirrors! Let the things themselves continue unstudied!
Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself! Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself! (Say! what real happiness have you had one single time through your whole life?)
Let the limited years of life do nothing for the limitless years of death! (Say! what do you suppose death will do, then?)

[6. You just maturing youth! You male or female!]

[7. With antecedents]

[8. Splendor of falling day, floating and filling me]

[9. A thought of what I am here for]

A thought of what I am here for,
Of these years I sing—how they pass through convulsed pains, as through parturitions;
How America illustrates birth, gigantic youth, the promise, the sure fulfilment, despite of people—Illustrates evil as well as good;
Of how many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity;
How few see the arrived models, the Athletes, The States—or see freedom or spirituality—or hold any faith in results,
(But I see the Athletes—and I see the results glorious and inevitable—and they again leading to other results;)
How the great cities appear—How the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful, as I love them,
How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and resounding, keep on and on;
How society waits unformed, and is between things ended and things begun;
How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of freedom, and of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society, and of all that is begun;
And how The States are complete in themselves—And how all triumphs and glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward,
And how these of mine, and of The States, will in their turn be convulsed, and serve other parturitions and transitions,
And how all people, sights, combinations, the Democratic masses too, serve—and how every fact serves,
And how now, or at any time, each serves the exquisite transition of Death.

[10. Historian! you who celebrate bygones!]

Historian! you who celebrate bygones!
You have explored the outward, the surface of the races—the life that has exhibited itself,
You have treated man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers, and priests;
But now I also, arriving, contribute something:
I, an habitué of the Alleghanies, treat man as he is in the influences of Nature, in himself, in his own inalienable rights,
Advancing, to give the spirit and the traits of new Democratic ages, myself, personally,
(Let the future behold them all in me—Me, so puzzling and contradictory—Me, a Manhattanese, the most loving and arrogant of men;)
I do not tell the usual facts, proved by records and documents,
What I tell, (talking to every born American,) requires no further proof than he or she who will hear me, will furnish, by silently meditating alone;
I press the pulse of the life that has hitherto seldom exhibited itself, but has generally sought concealment, (the great pride of man, in himself,)
I illuminate feelings, faults, yearnings, hopes—I have come at last, no more ashamed nor afraid;
Chanter of Personality, outlining a history yet to be,
I project the ideal man, the American of the future.

[11. The thought of fruitage]

The thought of fruitage,
Of Death, (the life greater)—of seeds dropping into the ground—of birth,
Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to impregnable and swarming places,
Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and the rest, are to be,
Of what a few years will show there in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the rest,
Of what the feuillage of America is the preparation for—and of what all the sights, North, South, East and West, are;
Of the temporary use of materials for identity's sake,
Of departing—of the growth of a mightier race than any yet,
Of myself, soon, perhaps, closing up my songs by these shores,
Of California—of Oregon—and of me journeying hence to live and sing there;
Of the Western Sea—of the spread inland between it and the spinal river,
Of the great pastoral area, athletic and feminine,
Of all sloping down there where the fresh free-giver, the mother, the Mississippi flows—and Westward still;
Of future men and women there—of happiness in those high plateaus, ranging three thousand miles, warm and cold,
Of cities yet unsurveyed and unsuspected, (as I am also, and as it must be,)
Of the new and good names—of the strong developments—of the inalienable homesteads,
Of a free original life there—of simple diet, and clean and sweet blood,
Of litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there,
Of immense spiritual results, future years, inland, spread there each side of the Anahuacs,
Of these Leaves well-understood there, (being made for that area,)
Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there,
(O it lurks in me night and day—What is gain, after all, to savageness and freedom?)

[12. To oratists—to male or female]

[13. Laws for Creations]

[14. Poets to come!]

[15. Who has gone farthest? For I swear I will go farther]

Who has gone farthest? For I swear I will go farther;
And who has been just? For I would be the most just person of the earth;
And who most cautious? For I would be more cautious;
And who has been happiest? O I think it is I! I think no one was ever happier than I;
And who has lavished all? For I lavish constantly the best I have;
And who has been firmest? For I would be firmer;
And who proudest? For I think I have reason to be the proudest son alive—for I am the son of the brawny and tall-topt city;
And who has been bold and true? For I would be the boldest and truest being of the universe;
And who benevolent? For I would show more benevolence than all the rest;
And who has projected beautiful words through the longest time? By God! I will outvie him! I will say such words, they shall stretch through longer time!
And who has received the love of the most friends? For I know what it is to receive the passionate love of many friends;
And to whom has been given the sweetest from women, and paid them in kind? For I will take the like sweets and pay them in kind;
And who possesses a perfect and enamoured body? For I do not believe any one possesses a more perfect or enamoured body than mine;
And who thinks the amplest thoughts? For I will surround those thoughts;
And who has made hymns fit for the earth? For I am mad with devouring extacy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth!

[16. They shall arise in the States—mediums shall]

They shall arise in the States—mediums shall,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness,
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos,
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive,
They shall be complete women and men—their pose brawny and supple, their drink water, their blood clean and clear,
They shall enjoy materialism and the sight of products—they shall enjoy the sight of the beef, lumber, bread-stuffs, of Chicago, the great city,
They shall train themselves to go in public to become oratists, (orators and oratresses,)
Strong and sweet shall their tongues be—poems and materials of poems shall come from their lives—they shall be makers and finders,
Of them, and of their works, shall emerge divine conveyers, to convey gospels,
Characters, events, retrospections, shall be conveyed in gospels—Trees, animals, waters, shall be conveyed,
Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be conveyed.

[17. Now we start hence, I with the rest, on our journeys through The States]

[18. Me imperturbe]

Me imperturbe,
Me 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,
Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought;
Me private, or public, or menial, or solitary—all these subordinate, (I am eternally equal with the best—I am not subordinate;)
Me toward the Mexican Sea, or in the Mannahatta, or the Tennessee, or far north, or inland,
A river-man, or a man of the woods, or of any farm-life of These States, or of the coast, or the lakes, or Kanada,
Me, wherever my life is to be lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies!
O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

[19. I was looking a long while for the history of the past for myself, and for these Chants—and now I have found it,]

I was looking a long while for the history of the past for myself, and for these Chants—and now I have found it,
It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither accept nor reject,)
It is no more in the legends than in all else,
It is in the present—it is this earth to-day,
It is in Democracy—in this America—the old world also,
It is the life of one man or one woman to-day, the average man of to-day;
It is languages, social customs, literatures, arts,
It is the broad show of artificial things, ships, machinery, politics, creeds, modern improvements, and the interchanges of nations,
All for the average man of to-day.

[20. American mouth-songs!]

[21. As I walk, solitary, unattended]