The end I know not, it is all in Thee, Or small or great I know not — haply what broad fields, what lands, Haply the brutish measureless human andergrowth I know, Transplanted there may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee, Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn'd to reaping-tools, Haply the lifeless cross I know, Europe's dead cross, may bud and blossom there. One effort more, my altar this bleak sand; That Thou O God my life hast lighted, 41 With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, My hands, my limbs grow nerveless, Thee, Thee at least I know. Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving? What do I know of life? what of myself? I know not even my own work past or present, Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition, Mocking, perplexing me. 60 WHEN the full-grown poet came, Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night), saying, He is mine; But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone; – Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand; And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands, Which he will never release until he reconciles the two, And wholly and joyously blends them. The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun, Thou born to match the gale (thou art all wings), To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails, Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating, At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America, That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud, In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul, What joys! what joys were thine! THE OX-TAMER 1876. IN a far-away northern county in the placid pastoral region, Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous tamer of oxen, There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to break them, He will take the wildest steer in the world and break him and tame him, He will go fearless without any whip where the young bullock chafes up and down the yard, The bullock's head tosses restless high in the air with raging eyes, Yet see you! how soon his rage subsides how soon this tamer tames him; See you! on the farms hereabout a hundred oxen young and old, and he is the man who has tamed them, They all know him, all are affectionate to him; See you ! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking; Some are buff-color'd, some mottled, one has a white line running along his back, some are brindled, Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign) see you! the bright hides, See, the two with stars on their foreheads see, the round bodies and broad backs, How straight and square they stand on their legs what fine sagacious eyes! WHAT BEST I SEE IN THEE1 TO U. S. G. RETURN'D FROM HIS WORLD'S TOUR WHAT best I see in thee, Is not that where thou mov'st down history's great highways, Ever undimm'd by time shoots warlike victory's dazzle, Or that thou sat'st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace, Or thou the man whom feudal Europe fêted, venerable Asia swarm'd upon, Who walk'd with kings with even pace the round world's promenade; But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings, Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio's, Indiana's millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front, Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world's promenade, Were all so justified. 1881. 1 So General Grant, after circumambiating the world, has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration - his life of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering what the people can see in Grant' to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities (history has presented none more trying, no born monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy), may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself with credit year after year-command over a million armed men — fight more than fifty pitch'd battles-rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined -and then, retiring, quietly (with a cigar in his mouth), make the promenade of the whole world, through its courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people like and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man- no art, no poetry-only practical sense, ability to do, or,try his best to do, what devolv'd upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois -general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secessionPresident following (a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself) — nothing heroic, as the authorities put it-and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him. (Specimen Days, September 27, 1879. Complete Prose Works, pp. 146, 147.) See also Whitman's poem: On the Death of General Grant.' 2 Compare Whitman's entry in his journal during his trip through Colorado: I have found the law of my own poems,' was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness - the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. (In Nature's grandest shows,' says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.') We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly-mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us every rood a new view flashing and each flash defying description - on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass - but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañion, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen- all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can. (Specimen Days. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., p. 136.) TO A LOCOMOTIVE IN WINTER' THEE for my recitative, Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining, Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance, Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front, Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple, The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack, Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels, Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following, Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering; Type of the modern- emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent, 1 Contrast Wordsworth's attitude toward the railroad and its invasion of natural scenes! And compare Whitman's Specimen Days, April 29, 1879: 'It was a happy thought to build the Hudson River railroad right along the shore. . . . I see, hear, the locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly, away off there, night and day - less than a mile distant, and in full view by day. I like both sight and sound. Express trains thunder and lighten along; of freight trains, most of them very long, there cannot be less than a hundred a day. At night far down you see the headlight approaching, coming steadily on like a meteor. The river at night has its special character-beauties.' 1876, vol. i, p. 369. AFTER AN INTERVAL (NOVEMBER 22, 1875, MIDNIGHT-SATURN AND MARS IN CONJUNCTION) AFTER an interval, reading, here in the midnight, With the great stars looking on — all the stars of Orion looking, And the silent Pleiades-and the duo looking of Saturn and ruddy Mars; Pondering, reading my own songs, after a long interval (sorrow and death familiar now), Ere closing the book, what pride! what joy! to find them, Standing so well the test of death and night! And the duo of Saturn and Mars! |