230 Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas! Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems! You, strew'd with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach'd you. Passage to more than India! Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers! Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land! Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks! O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows! O day and night, passage to you! O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter! Passage to you! 240 Till when the ties loosen, All but the ties eternal, Time and Space, Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us. Then we burst forth, we float, In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them, Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul. THE LAST INVOCATION AT the last, tenderly, 1871. From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house, From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors, Let me be wafted. What charm thy music works! thou makest pass before me, Ladies and cavaliers long dead, barons are in their castle halls, the troubadours are singing, Arm'd knights go forth to redress wrongs, some in quest of the holy Graal; I see the tournament, I see the contestants incased in heavy armor seated on stately champing horses, I hear the shouts, the sounds of blows and smiting steel; I see the Crusaders' tumultuous armies hark, how the cymbals clang, Lo, where the monks walk in advance, bearing the cross on high. Swift to thy spell a shuddering hum like distant thunder rolls, Lo, where the arm'd men hasten - lo, 'mid the clouds of dust the glint of bayonets, I see the grime-faced cannoneers, I mark the rosy flash amid the smoke, I hear the cracking of the guns; Nor war alone-thy fearful music-song, wild player, brings every sight of fear, The deeds of ruthless brigands, rapine, murder I hear the cries for help! I see ships foundering at sea, I behold on deck and below deck the terrible tableaus. 1 Read by Whitman at the Commencement of Dartmouth College, in 1872. The poem originally began with what is now Section 2, and the title as well as the first line was' As a strong bird on pinions free.' What is now Section 1 was added in the 1881 edition. See the original Preface of this poem, in the Complete Prose Works, pp. 268-272. One of its chief ideas is condensed in two paragraphs near the end : The Four Years' War is over- and in the peaceful, strong, exciting, fresh occasions of to-day, and of the future, that strange, sad war is hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of sentries, the prisons, the hospitals-(ah! the hospitals!) — ali have passed away all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and lusty generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of hatred, conflict, death. So let it be obliterated. I say the life of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all, south, north, east, west. To help put the United States (even if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a chant -to rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they are to play, and are even now playing-to the thought of their great future, and the attitude conform'd to it especially their great esthetic, moral, scientific future (of which their vulgar material and political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments by an orchestra), these, as hitherto, are still, for me, among my hopes, ambitions. "Leaves of Grass," already publish'd, is, in its intentions, the song of a great composite democratic individual, male or female. And following on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my mind to run through the chants of this volume (if ever completed), the thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality.' Compare also Whitman's Democratic Vistas, Complete Prose Works, pp. 197-250; "A Backward Glance 20 Nor rhyme, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign court or indoor library; But an odor I'd bring as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of an Illinois prairie, With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas uplands, or Florida's glades, Or the Saguenay's black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron, With presentment of Yellowstone's scenes, or Yosemite, And murmuring under, pervading all, I'd bring the rustling sea-sound, That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world. o'er Travel'd Roads;" and, especially, one of Whitman's early notes, in Notes and Fragments, p. 59: — 'In Poems-bring in the idea of Mother- the idea of the mother with numerous children- all, great and small, old and young, equal in her eyes-as the identity of America.' |