Langston Hughes / Walt Whitman

[[''//"So Long!"//''->WhitmanSoLong]], 1860 The final poem in "Leaves of Grass" (Walt Whitman, 1860) ''"The unknown sphere, more real than I dreamed, more direct, darts awakening rays about me––//So long!// Remember my words––I love you––I depart from materials, I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead."'' *** In 1860, Walt Whitman issued a new, vastly expanded edition of his poems and closed the volume with a poem he called "So Long!" A century later, Langston Hughes issued the first gathering of his scattered poems and //opened// the volume with those same words: "So long." It's no accident that the African American poet most indebted to Whitman would make this gesture of picking up where Whitman left off, using that slippery and evocative phrase, "so long," as the pivot between a book written just on the edge of the Civil War, a war that would evolve into the country's first extended battle over civil rights for balck Americans, and a book written just on the edge of the second great battle over civil rights for black Americans, the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Both books were put together just prior to some of America's most violent internal battles, as cities burned a century apart, inflamed by racial injustice: Los Angeles and Detroit and Cleveland and Newark, with their so-called race riots in the 1960s, echosed Atlanta and Richmond and New York in the 1860s, as the end of slavery set one group of cities ablaze and the failure to end racial injustice a hundred years later set another group on fire.' *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//" [[Click here to read in full Whitman's original poem->WhitmanSoLong]] This same phrase acts a refrain throughout several of the pieces across Hughes' //Selected Works//, most notably in one scene in the cluster titled "[[Montage of a Dream Deferred]]"; where the poem replaces the famously revolutionary writing "[[Freedom's Plow]]", with this new item written specifically for the 1959 anthology.

''Afro-American Fragment'' [[So long,->So Long!]] So [[far away->LHjourney]] Is (text-colour:red)[Africa]. Not even [[memories alive->AAFmemalive]] Save those that [[history books create->AAFneg]], Save those that songs Beat back into the blood– (text-colour:red)[Beat out of blood] with (text-colour:red)[words sad-sung] In (text-colour:red)[strange un-Negro tongue]– [[So long->AAFref]], So far away Is Africa. Subdued and time-lost Are the (text-colour:red)[drums]––and yet Through (text-colour:red)[some vast mist of [[race]]] There comes this (text-colour:red)[song] I do not understand, This (text-colour:red)[[[song of atavistic land->true theory]]], Of bitter yearnings lost (text-colour:red)[Without a place]– So long, So far away Is Africa's [[Dark face.->AAFend]] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

(text-colour:red)[Langston Hughes] Selected Poems 1959 [[Afro-American Fragment->AAFlink]] [[Distance Nowhere->DNLink]] [[Montage of a Dream Deferred]] [[Words Like Freedom]] //Instructions Key:// – Use the "Forward" and "Backward" arrows embedded in the top-left area of the page background to navigate through the texts. – [[Blue texts contain hyperlinks that you can click on to explore literary influences, critical analyses, and further context or commentary.->Title]] – (colour:red) [Red texts indicate important words, phrases, images, or themes.] [[About The Project]]

Harlem [[What]] happens to a dream [[deferred->Deferred]]? (colour:red)[Does it] dry up like [[a raisin in the sun]]? Or [[fester]] like a (colour:red)[sore]— And then run? Does it stink like [[rotten meat]]? Or crust and [[sugar]] over— like a (colour:red)[syrupy sweet]? [[Maybe]] it just sags like a (colour:red)[heavy load]. [[Or does it]] (colour:red)[explode]? [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

[[Words Like Freedom->WLFAnnot]]: [[I, Too]] [[Freedom's Plow]] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

I, Too I, too, [[sing]] (colour:red)[America]. [[I am->I2]] the [[darker brother]]. They send me to eat in the (colour:red)[kitchen] When (colour:red)[company] comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And (colour:red)[grow strong]. [[Tomorrow,]] I’ll be (colour:red)[at the table] When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” (colour:red)[Then]. Besides, (colour:red)[They’ll see how beautiful I am] And be ashamed— [[I, too->settone]], am [[America]]. [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

So Long [[//So long//->So Long!]] is [[in the song]] and it's in the way (colour:red)[you're gone] but it's like a [[foreign language]] in my (colour:red)[mind] and maybe I was [[blind]] I could not see and would not know [[you're gone]] (colour:red)[so long] so long. [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

[[Montage of a Dream Deferred->MoaDD]]: [[Harlem]] ~ [[So Long]] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

''So Long'' 1 To conclude—I announce what comes after me; I announce mightier offspring, orators, days, and then, for the present, depart. I remember I said, before my leaves sprang at all, I would raise my voice jocund and strong, with reference to consummations. When America does what was promis’d, When there are plentiful athletic bards, inland and seaboard, When through These States walk a hundred millions of superb persons, When the rest part away for superb persons, and contribute to them, When breeds of the most perfect mothers denote America, Then to me and mine our due fruition. I have press’d through in my own right, I have sung the Body and the Soul—War and Peace have I sung, And the songs of Life and of Birth—and shown that there are many births: I have offer’d my style to everyone—I have journey’d with confident step; While my pleasure is yet at the full, I whisper, So long! And take the young woman’s hand, and the young man’s hand, for the last time. 2 I announce natural persons to arise; I announce justice triumphant; I announce uncompromising liberty and equality; I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of pride. I announce that the identity of These States is a single identity only; I announce the Union more and more compact, indissoluble; I announce splendors and majesties to make all the previous politics of the earth insignificant. I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d; I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for. I announce a man or woman coming—perhaps you are the one, (So long!) I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed. I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold; I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation; I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded; I announce a race of splendid and savage old men. 3 O thicker and faster! (So long!) O crowding too close upon me; I foresee too much—it means more than I thought; It appears to me I am dying. Hasten throat, and sound your last! Salute me—salute the days once more. Peal the old cry once more. Screaming electric, the atmosphere using, At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, Swiftly on, but a little while alighting, Curious envelop’d messages delivering, Sparkles hot, seed ethereal, down in the dirt dropping, Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring, To ages, and ages yet, the growth of the seed leaving, To troops out of me, out of the army, the war arising—they the tasks I have set promulging, To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing—their affection me more clearly explaining, To young men my problems offering—no dallier I—I the muscle of their brains trying, So I pass—a little time vocal, visible, contrary; Afterward, a melodious echo, passionately bent for—(death making me really undying;) The best of me then when no longer visible—for toward that I have been incessantly preparing. What is there more, that I lag and pause, and crouch extended with unshut mouth? Is there a single final farewell? 4 My songs cease—I abandon them; From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally, solely to you. Camerado! This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man; (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you; I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth. O how your fingers drowse me! Your breath falls around me like dew—your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears; I feel immerged from head to foot; Delicious—enough. Enough, O deed impromptu and secret! Enough, O gliding present! Enough, O summ’d-up past! 5 Dear friend, whoever you are, take this kiss, I give it especially to you—Do not forget me; I feel like one who has done work for the day, to retire awhile; I receive now again of my many translations—from my avataras ascending—while others doubtless await me; An unknown sphere, more real than I dream’d, more direct, darts awakening rays about me—So long! Remember my words—I may again return, I love you—I depart from materials; I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead. [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

Once again, the structural and methodological influence of Whitman upon the editoral choices Hughes made for this 1959 publication are evidenced most clearly in the headline-titles that comprise the series of clusters or chapters which the groups of poems are divided unitarily into. ''Compare Hughes' //"Words Like Freedom"// with Whitman's //"Songs of Parting"//.'' *** When Hughes built his final cluster of poems, like WHitman he gathered together some earlier and some more recent poems. Whitman named his last cluster "Songs of Parting," and Hughes called his "Words Like Freedom," which we might think of as "Songs of Starting". One poem Whitman included in his cluster was the brief couplet called "The Untold Want": "The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,/Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find". Here, in this little "Songs of Parting" poem, is where Hughes picked up his "seeking and finding" [[Old Walt]]... Both these small poems may initially strike us as examples of the older Whitman turning his back on his radical composting notion of death and life and looking instead toward a religiously conventional afterlife, something beyond his life and land, an "Invisible World". *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//" Perhaps as Whitman seems to turn his back on his former revolutionary self, so too does Hughes respond to this sense of being foresaken, by both Whitman and the empty promises of his America alike. Instead, he proclaims his own "Words Like Freedom", that seem to [[announce Whitman's prophesies of true American ideals->WhitmanSoLong]] on Hughes' own terms.

''Freedom's Plow'' When [[a man]] starts out with nothing, When a man starts out with his hands Empty, but clean, When a man (colour:red)[starts to build a world, ] He starts first with himself And the (colour:red)[faith] that is in his heart- The strength there, The (colour:red)[will] there to build. [[First in the heart is the dream- Then the mind starts seeking a way.->firstin]] His eyes look out on the world, On the great wooded world, On the rich soil of the world, On the [[rivers of the world->The Negro Speaks of Rivers]]. The (colour:red)[eyes] see there (colour:red)[materials for building], See the difficulties, too, and the [[obstacles]]. The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles. The hand seeks tools to cut the wood, To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters. Then the hand seeks other hands to help, [[A community of hands to help->community]]- Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone, But a community dream. (colour:red)[Not my dream alone], but our dream. Not my world alone, But your world and my world, Belonging to all the hands who build. A long time ago, but not too long ago, Ships came from across the sea Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers, Adventurers and booty seekers, Free men and indentured servants, Slave men and slave masters, all new- (colour:red)[To a new world, America! ] With billowing sails the galleons came Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams. In little bands together, Heart reaching out to heart, Hand reaching out to hand, They began to build our land. Some were free hands Seeking a greater freedom, Some were indentured hands Hoping to find their freedom, Some were slave hands Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom, But the word was there always: Freedom. Down into the earth went the plow In the free hands and the slave hands, In indentured hands and adventurous hands, Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands That planted and harvested the food that fed And the cotton that clothed America. Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America. Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls That moved and transported America. Crack went the whips that drove the horses Across the plains of America. Free hands and slave hands, Indentured hands, adventurous hands, [[White hands and black hands Held the plow handles->whitehands]], Ax handles, hammer handles, Launched the boats and whipped the horses That fed and housed and moved America. Thus together through labor, All these hands made America. Labor! Out of labor came villages And the towns that grew cities. Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats And the sailboats and the steamboats, Came the wagons, and the coaches, Covered wagons, stage coaches, Out of labor came the factories, Came the foundries, came the railroads. Came the marts and markets, shops and stores, Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured, Sold in shops, piled in warehouses, Shipped the wide world over: Out of labor-white hands and black hands- Came the dream, the strength, the will, And the way to build America. Now it is Me here, and You there. Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston and El Paso- Now it’s the U.S.A. A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said: [[ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL- ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS- AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. His name was Jefferson->srsly]]. There were slaves then, But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too, And silently took for granted That what he said was also meant for them. It was a long time ago, But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said: NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT. There were slaves then, too, But in their hearts the slaves knew What he said must be meant for every human being- Else it had no meaning for anyone. Then a man said: BETTER TO DIE FREE THAN TO LIVE SLAVES He was a colored man who had been a slave But had run away to freedom. And the slaves knew What Frederick Douglass said was true. [[With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died. John Brown was hung. Before the Civil War, days were dark,->johnbrown]] And nobody knew for sure When freedom would triumph 'Or if it would,' thought some. But others new it had to triumph. In those dark days of slavery, Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom, (colour:red)[The slaves made up a song: Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On! ] That song meant just what it said: Hold On! Freedom will come! Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On! [[Out of war it came, bloody and terrible! But it came!->outofwar]] Some there were, as always, Who doubted that the war would end right, That the slaves would be free, Or that the union would stand, But now we know how it all came out. Out of the darkest days for people and a nation, We know now how it came out. There was light when the battle clouds rolled away. There was a great wooded land, And men united as a nation. [[America is a dream. The poet says it was promises.->promises]] The people say it is promises-that will come true. The people do not always say things out loud, Nor write them down on paper. [[The people often hold Great thoughts in their deepest hearts->great thoughts]] And sometimes only blunderingly express them, Haltingly and stumblingly say them, And faultily put them into practice. The people do not always understand each other. But there is, somewhere there, Always the trying to understand, And the trying to say, 'You are a man. Together we are building our land.' America! Land created in common, Dream nourished in common, Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on! If the house is not yet finished, Don’t be discouraged, builder! If the fight is not yet won, Don’t be weary, soldier! (colour:red)[The plan and the pattern is here, Woven from the beginning Into the warp and woof of America: ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL. ] NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN WITHOUT HIS CONSENT. BETTER DIE FREE, THAN TO LIVE SLAVES. Who said those things? Americans! Who owns those words? America! Who is America? You, me! We are America! To the enemy who would conquer us from without, We say, NO! To the enemy who would divide And conquer us from within, We say, NO! [[FREEDOM!->obstacles]] BROTHERHOOD! DEMOCRACY! To all the enemies of these great words: We say, NO! A long time ago, An enslaved people heading toward freedom Made up a song: Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On! [[The plow plowed a new furrow Across the field of history.->great thoughts]] Into that furrow (colour:red)[the freedom seed was dropped. From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow. That tree is for everybody, For all America, for all the world. May its branches spread and shelter grow Until all races and all peoples know its shade.] [[KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!->echoing]] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

Old Walt [[Old Walt Whitman]] Went finding and seeking, (colour:Red)[Finding] [[less than sought]] (colour:Red)[Seeking] more than found, [[Every detail minding]] Of the seeking or the finding. Pleasured (colour:Red)[equally] [[In seeking as in finding->presparticip]], Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding. [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

Border Line I used to [[wonder]] About [[living and dying]]-- I think the (colour:red)[difference] lies Between tears and [[crying]]. I used to (colour:red)[wonder] About here and there-- I think the (colour:red)[distance] [[Is nowhere->less than sought]]. [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

''The Negro Speaks of Rivers'' [[I’ve->TNSoR"I"]] known rivers: (text-colour:red)[I’ve] known rivers [[ancient as the world->rivers]] and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. [[My soul has grown deep like the rivers.->TNSoRcolloq]] (text-colour:red)[I] bathed in the [[Euphrates->rivers]] when (text-colour:red)[dawns] were young. (text-colour:red)[I] built my hut near the [[Congo->rivers]] and it lulled me to sleep. (text-colour:red)[I] looked upon the [[Nile->rivers]] and raised the pyramids above it. (text-colour:red)[I] heard the singing of the [[Mississippi->rivers]] when [[Abe Lincoln->Lincoln]] went down to New Orleans, and (text-colour:red)[I’ve] seen its [[muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset->TNSoRlight]]. [[I’ve known rivers->TNSoRanap]]: Ancient, (text-colour:red)[dusky] rivers. (colour:red)[My soul has grown deep like the rivers.] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

*** Hughes was the first African-American poet to sense the affinity between the inclusive "I" of Whitman (which Whitman claimed as his most important innovation)--//"the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and towards his fellow humanity"// ("A Backward Glance," 564)--and the "I" of the blues and even of the spirituals. The result of Hughes's appropriation of this triply descended "I" is amply demonstrated in one of his first published poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". *** –– George B. Hutchinson, //Langston Hughes and the "Other" Whitman// in //The Continuing presence of Walt Whitman: the life after the life// (ed.Robert K. Martin), 1992, Iowa. Hughes thus centres black subjectivity as the central preoccupation of his poetic persona, which he positions specifically as "the Negro" in the poem's title. Rather than cushioning the piece from the perspective of 'a Negro', he rather asserts this poem as being spoken in "the" definitive voice of the African American people -- a unifying and representative imaginary, that combats the fragmentation of the poem's title, which Hughes thus implies is fundamentally intertwined with the contradiction of existing in the United States as a person who is "Afro-American". *** "I announce a man or woman coming—perhaps you are the one, (So long!) I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed. *** //So Long!//, Whitman, //Leaves of Grass//, 1860. In these lines, and the title of this poem, Hughes appears to envision himself as the imaginary future subject of the truly "United" States of America, that both he and Whitman foresee in an idyllic age beyond their own. For more examples of Whitman's use of the prophetic first-person, see in-full [[//"So Long!"//->WhitmanSoLong]], or specifically the passage on Whitman's [["True Theory" of America->true theory]]. This poetic style can be seem to deeply inform Hughes' literary development, not only in this poem, but also in the titular piece of this first cluster in the collection, [[//"Afro-American Fragment"//->Afro-American Fragment]]

*** Though Hughes would later, for the most part, turn away from the Whitmanesque style of free verse, the example of Whitman's break with traditional definitions of the poetic, his attempts to achieve an orally based poetics with the cadence and diction of the voice on the street, at the pond-side, or at the pulpit, provided a partial model for the young black poet looking for a way to sing his own song, which would be at the same time a song of his people. *** ––George B. Hutchinson, 'Langston Hughes and the "Other" Whitman', as published in //The Continuing presence of Walt Whitman: the life after the life// (ed. Robert K. Martin), 1992, Iowa.

-"anaphora, n." (//Rhetoric//): The repetition of the same word or phrase in several successive clauses. (OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2017. Web. 3 May 2017.) Hughes' repetition establishes the cyclical and vernacular style of his poetry, as inherited stylistically from the free-verse example of [[Whitman's own poetic works->TNSoRcolloq]]. *** Moreover, these forms embodied the very sort of call-and-response pattern for which Whitman seemed to be asking. It would take Hughes's example (and later that of Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling Brown) to transform the dialect tradition into an uncompromising revelation of the folk-based African-American expressive arts, with a range, a flexibility, and a precision that had not yet found their way into poetry. *** ––George B. Hutchinson, //Langston Hughes and the "Other" Whitman// in //The Continuing presence of Walt Whitman: the life after the life// edited by Robert K. Martin, 1992, Iowa. Besides the African diasporic roots of "orature" and the poetic patterns of colloquial speech, Hughes' cyclical form digs deeper to access the tides of history that he tracks in the geography of the poem's [[fluvial allusions->rivers]].

[Rivers] *** I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. *** As Hughes invokes a series of disparate scenes grounded in a list of great rivers of human civilisation, he establishes a key thematic motif of his poetry: the search for African-American literary and cultural heritage, in the face of the erasure and the historical violence of Atlantic slave trade. *** "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is perhaps the most profound of these poems of heritage and strength. Composed when Hughes was a mere 17 years old, and dedicated to W. E. B. DuBois, it is a sonorous evocation of transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory. The rivers are part of God's body, and participate in his immortality. They are the earthly analogues of eternity: deep, continuous, mysterious. They are named in the order of their association with black history. The black man has drunk of their life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed their immortality. He and the rivers have become one. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, //Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry.// Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press Hughes follows the footsteps of an imagined ancestry, from the birth of mankind in the Fertile Crescent river valley (''"Euphrates"''), along West to the edge of the African content (''"Nile"''), and deeper into its heart (''"Congo"'') – before the abrupt shift across to North America, and the Deep South plantation lands of the ''"Mississippi"''. *** Readers rarely notice that if the soul of the Negro in this poem goes back to the Euphrates, it goes back to a pre-"racial" dawn and a geography far from Africa that is identified with neither blackness nor whiteness--a geography at the time of Hughes's writing considered the cradle of all the world's civilizations and possibly the location of the Garden of Eden. Thus, even in this poem about the depth of the Negro's soul Hughes avoids racial essentialism while nonetheless stressing the existential, racialized conditions of black and modern identity. *** ––George Hutchinson, //The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White//, Copyright © 1995 by the President and Board of Fellows of Harvard College. This poem was first published in 1921 in //Crisis// magazine, and was written by Hughes on a train ride to Mexico at the age of just eighteen years. As his train crossed the Mississippi river, this poem was born from his thoughts on the passage of history that brought him to where he is now – as so many others had come before him, in the great tapestry of American history. *** The sun was setting as the train reached St. Louis and began the long passage from Illinois across the Mississippi and into Missouri, where Hughes had been born. The beauty of the hour and the setting--the great muddy river glinting in the sun, the banked and tinted summer clouds, the rush of the train toward the dark, all touched an adolescent sensibility tender after the gloomy day. The sense of beauty and death, of hope and despair, fused in his imagination. A phrase came to him, then a sentence. Drawing an envelope from his pocket, he began to scribble. In a few minutes Langston had finished a poem. *** --Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 1988. Copyright © by Arnold Rampersad.

*** With its allusions to deep dusky rivers, the setting sun, sleep, and the soul, (colour:red)["The Negro Speaks of Rivers"] is suffused with the image of death and, simultaneously, the idea of deathlessness. As in Whitman's philosophy, only the knowledge of death can bring the primal spark of poetry and life. Here Langston Hughes became [["the outsetting bard," in Whitman's phrase->outsettingbard]], the poet who sings of life because at last he has known death. Balanced between the knowledge of love and of death, the poetic will gathers force. From the depths of grief the poet sweeps back to life by clinging to his greatest faith, which is in his people and his sense of kinship with them. His frail, intimidated self, as well as the image of his father, are liquidated. A man-child is born, soft-spoken, almost casual, yet noble and proud, and black as Africa. The muddy river is his race, the primal source out of which he is born anew; on that (colour:red)["muddy bosom"] of the race as black mother, or grandmother, he rests secure forever. The angle of the sun on the muddy water is like the angle of a poet's vision, which turns mud into gold. The diction of the poem is simple and unaffected either by dialect or rhetorical excess; its eloquence is like that of the best of the black spirituals. *** ––Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 1988. Copyright © by Arnold Rampersad.

From Walt Whitman's //Out of the Cradle Rocking Endlessly//. Published in the 1860 edition of //Leaves of Grass// as: //'[[A Word out of the Sea]]'//. *** ... The aria sinking, All else continuing—the stars shining, The winds blowing—the notes of the wondrous bird echoing, With angry moans the fierce old mother yet, as ever, incessantly moaning, On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling, The yellow half-moon, enlarged, sagging down, droop- ing, the face of the sea almost touching, The boy extatic—with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying, The love in the heart pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting, The aria's meaning, the ears, the Soul, swiftly depos- iting, The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, The colloquy there—the trio—each uttering, The undertone—the savage old mother, incessantly crying, To the boy's Soul's questions sullenly timing—some drowned secret hissing, To (colour:yellow) [the outsetting bard of love]. ... *** [[Click to view full poem, 1860 edition.->A Word out of the Sea]]

(from //The Walt Whitman Archive//: http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/poems/53) A WORD OUT OF THE SEA. OUT of the rocked cradle, Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the boy's mother's womb, and from the nipples of her breasts, Out of the Ninth Month midnight, Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wandered alone, bare- headed, barefoot, Down from the showered halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears, From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist, From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease, From the myriad thence-aroused words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting, As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, Borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly, A man—yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and here- after, Taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. REMINISCENCE. ONCE, Paumanok, When the snows had melted, and the Fifth Month grass was growing, Up this sea-shore, in some briers, Two guests from Alabama—two together, And their nest, and four light-green eggs, spotted with brown, And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand, And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. Shine! Shine! Pour down your warmth, great Sun! While we bask—we two together. Two together! Winds blow South, or winds blow North, Day come white, or night come black, Home, or rivers and mountains from home, Singing all time, minding no time, If we two but keep together. Till of a sudden, May-be killed, unknown to her mate, One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest, Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next, Nor ever appeared again. And thenceforward, all summer, in the sound of the sea, And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather, Over the hoarse surging of the sea, Or flitting from brier to brier by day, I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird, The solitary guest from Alabama. Blow! Blow! Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore; I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me. Yes, when the stars glistened, All night long, on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake, Down, almost amid the slapping waves, Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears. He called on his mate, He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men, know. Yes, my brother, I know, The rest might not—but I have treasured every note, For once, and more than once, dimly, down to the beach gliding, Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows, Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts, The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing, I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair, Listened long and long. Listened, to keep, to sing—now translating the notes, Following you, my brother. Soothe! Soothe! Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close, But my love soothes not me. Low hangs the moon—it rose late, O it is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love. O madly the sea pushes upon the land, With love—with love. O night! O do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers? What is that little black thing I see there in the white? Loud! Loud! Loud I call to you my love! High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, Surely you must know who is here, You must know who I am, my love. Low-hanging moon! What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow? O it is the shape of my mate! O moon, do not keep her from me any longer. Land! O land! Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again, if you would, For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look. O rising stars! Perhaps the one I want so much will rise with some of you. O throat! Sound clearer through the atmosphere! Pierce the woods, the earth, Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want. Shake out, carols! Solitary here—the night's carols! Carols of lonesome love! Death's carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O, under that moon, where she droops almost down into the sea! O reckless, despairing carols. But soft! Sink low — soft! Soft! Let me just murmur, And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea, For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me, So faint—I must be still to listen, But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me. Hither, my love! Here I am! Here! With this just-sustained note I announce myself to you, This gentle call is for you, my love. Do not be decoyed elsewhere! That is the whistle of the wind—it is not my voice, That is the fluttering of the spray, Those are the shadows of leaves. O darkness! O in vain! O I am very sick and sorrowful. O brown halo in the sky, near the moon, drooping upon the sea! O troubled reflection in the sea! O throat! O throbbing heart! O all—and I singing uselessly all the night. Murmur! Murmur on! O murmurs—you yourselves make me continue to sing, I know not why. O past! O joy! In the air—in the woods—over fields, Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved—but no more with me, We two together no more. The aria sinking, All else continuing—the stars shining, The winds blowing—the notes of the wondrous bird echoing, With angry moans the fierce old mother yet, as ever, incessantly moaning, On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling, The yellow half-moon, enlarged, sagging down, droop- ing, the face of the sea almost touching, The boy extatic—with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying, The love in the heart pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting, The aria's meaning, the ears, the Soul, swiftly depos- iting, The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, The colloquy there—the trio—each uttering, The undertone—the savage old mother, incessantly crying, To the boy's Soul's questions sullenly timing—some drowned secret hissing, To the outsetting bard of love. Bird! (then said the boy's Soul,) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me? For I that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, Now that I have heard you, Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake, And already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder, more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, Never to die. O throes! O you demon, singing by yourself—projecting me, O solitary me, listening—never more shall I cease imitating, perpetuating you, Never more shall I escape, Never more shall the reverberations, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night, By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon, The dusky demon aroused—the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me. O give me some clew! O if I am to have so much, let me have more! O a word! O what is my destination? O I fear it is henceforth chaos! O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and all shapes, spring as from graves around me! O phantoms! you cover all the land, and all the sea! O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown upon me; O vapor, a look, a word! O well-beloved! O you dear women's and men's phantoms! A word then, (for I will conquer it,) The word final, superior to all, Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen; Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves? Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? Answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whispered me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisped to me constantly the low and delicious word DEATH, And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death, Hissing melodious, neither like the bird, nor like my aroused child's heart, But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet, And creeping thence steadily up to my ears, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death. Which I do not forget, But fuse the song of two together, That was sung to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray beach, With the thousand responsive songs, at random, My own songs, awaked from that hour, And with them the key, the word up from the waves, The word of the sweetest song, and all songs, That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, The sea whispered me.

*** The magical transformation of the Mississippi from mud to gold by the sun's radiance is mirrored in the transformation of slaves into free men by Lincoln's Proclamation (and, in Hughes's poems, the transformation of shabby cabarets into gorgeous palaces, dancing girls into queens and priestesses by the spell of black music). As the rivers deepen with time, so does the black man's soul; as their waters ceaselessly flow, so will the black soul endure. The black man has seen the rise and fall of civilizations from the earliest times, seen the beauty and death-changes of the world over the thousands of years, and will survive even this America. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, //Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry.// Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press [[For more on the Emancipation Proclamation, click here.->EmProc]]

*** An expression of Negritude important in the 1960's is the recognition of African heritage. Hughes's poems strongly voicing this heritage, however, belong mostly to the earlist years of his career... ...A farewell to African themes is implicit, even in the title, in "Afro-American Fragment". "So long,/So far away/Is Africa," it begins, and admits that only history books and African tunes in "straange un-Negro tongue" preserve memories of it. Hughes's later role in perpetuating those meories is foreshadowed...His final approach to Negritude concerns Negroe's historical consciousness of their American past. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, //Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry.// Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

*** We tend to recall Whitman's "So Long" as the poem that enacts the ultimate metonymy, that full identification of Whitman with his book, because of its memorable lines: ''"This is no book,/Who touches this, touches a man, .../I spring from the pages into your arms––decease calls me forth."'' But it is also and primarily a poem in which Whitman makes clear his distress at how long the American experiment is taking to reach the fulfillment of its stated ideals, what he calls its "[[true theory]]". *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//" In this way as first illustrated by Folsom in his important essay, we can begin to comprehend and examine the extent to which Hughes allowed his personal immersion in the ideology and lexis of Whitman's poetry to shape his own poetic works, ranging from the level of word-choice minutiae to structural choices governing the entire composition of his 1959 collection, //Selected Poems.//

"Once more I proclaim the whole of America for each individual, without exception. As I have announced the (colour:red)[true theory...of the States], I adhere to it. ... //[[So long!->WhitmanSoLong]]// (colour:red)[I announce] natural persons to arise, I announce justice triumphant, I announce uncompromising liberty and equality, ... I announce that the identity of These States is a (colour:red)[single identity] only, I announce the Union more and more compact, I annouce splendors and majesties to make all (colour:red)[the previous politics of the earth] insignificant." ~ ––//So Long!//, Whitman, 1860, //Leaves of Grass//. *** Whitman ends his book, then, announcing a political utopia adn then sealing it with deferral: //So long!// He writes of the single identity of the states, the compaction of the union, just as the Union is about to violently come apart at the seams; he announces "uncomprimising liberty and equality" at the very time the Fugitive Slave Law was, as Whtiman argued, taking away every American's liberty by forcing citizens to be complicitous in supporting the base inequality of slavery. in this poem, it's as if he is saying "so long" to the United States as he has known the country and putting his faith in some distant and unknown future nation, one that could come into being only long after he is dead, when the [[deferred dream->Montage of a Dream Deferred]] might be realised, when the "splendors and majesties" might manifest themselves. *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

Emancipation Proclamation Washington, D.C. –– January 1, 1863 President Lincoln read the first draft of this document to his Cabinet members on July 22, 1862. After some changes, he issued the preliminary version on September 22, which specified that the final document would take effect January 1, 1863. Slaves in Confederate states which were not back in the Union by then would be free, but slaves in the Border States were not affected. The president knew the proclamation was a temporary military measure and only Congress could remove slavery permanently, but had the satisfaction of seeing the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, pass a few months before his death. The most controversial document in Lincoln's presidency, its signing met with both hostility and jubilation in the North. After the preliminary version was made public, Lincoln noted, "It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory." However, on the day he approved the final version, Lincoln remarked, "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper." *** By the President of the United States of America: A Proclamation. Whereas, on the twentysecond day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: "That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. "That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States." Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. Johns, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South-Carolina, North-Carolina, and Virginia, (except the fortyeight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth-City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued. And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages. And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service. And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God. In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh. By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State. *** From //Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln//, edited by Roy P. Basler et al., 2006, copyright The Abraham Lincoln Association.

In order to appreciate the extent to which this poem forms a response to the call preceding its publication by a century in the form of Whitman's iconic lines entitled //"So Long!"//, it is important to take into account the context of Hughes' biography that surrounds the moments when this poem was penned. Given the extent to which Hughes functions as a social commentator, such additional illuminations can oftentimes help shed light upon the central concerns that form the thematic basis of his poems, and how these change over time alongside the historical and his own personal developmentsr respectively. *** ...we must realize the moment that the poem recalls, one of the most charged moments in Hughes's life, when he left Columbia University and boarded a freighter for Africa in 1923, packing a box of books that he had picked up at Columbia, and then, in a moment of revulsion over the white traditions tha the thought he was abandoning to go to...his "atavistic land", he threw the books overboard, volume by volume...right up until he got to //Leaves of Grass//...he stopped, carried it with him to Africa, and held on to it for the rest of his life. *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

"//Save those that songs Beat back into the blood– Beat out of blood with words sad-sung In strange un-Negro tongue– So long, So far away Is Africa.//" As Whitman's titular phrase becomes the lamenting refrain of Hughes' new poem, the stirrings of the central tensions of the piece begin to jarr against one another. By fusing together the old and the new, the African and the American, Hughes' journey of discovery and the Whitman of his literary upbringing, the poem truly illustrates the fragmented sense of identity for which it is named. Just as Whitman embraced death in his own swan-song piece that gave way to Hughes' own, in this piece so too does Hughes yield to the violence of United States (//"beat out of blood with words sad-sung/In strange un-Negro tongue-//"); and look far ahead to the future where, though worlds away, Africa awaits to re-embrace its "time-lost" descendants––as Whitman too embraces the [[future readers from beyond the grave->AAFmemalive]].

As Hughes brings his first Whitmanian echo-piece to a close, its opening refrain serves once again to reveal an additional shade of meaning on his journey of investigating the nature of Afro-American existence. To go to Africa is to say (text-colour:red)["so long"] to America, however this is ultimately an impossibility because America has already been (text-colour:red)["beat[en] back into the blood"] of every (text-colour:red)["Afro-American"], whose songs and histories can only be accessed in a (text-colour:red)["strange un-Negro tongue"], foreign to that of their ancestors. With this line, Hughes connects the rhyme scheme of (text-colour:red)['race'/'place'/'face'] in an emphatic finale –– and thus challenges the reader to consider how these three disparate concepts, in many ways rendered totally estranged from one another, can be seen as unified in the formation and expression of identity. Is race as simple as something to be read from the (text-colour:red)['place'] and (text-colour:red)['face'] of another? Can (text-colour:red)['race'] every truly be separated from these parts of oneself; and what is the effect of depriving a racialised face of a sense of place--as the slave trade stripped all knowledge of native culture and history from those such as Hughes who look back through the generations to try to understand their place in American society. It is this simultaneous abstracted and unattainable longing for future ideals, and ceaseless reflexivity within the past that brings Hughes' poems to this point thematically, and textually in landing upon Whitman as the father of American poetry, and the progenitor of the poetic voice of struggle that Hughes directly channels here in his verbatim echoes of Whitman's very own swan-song; and perhaps, Hughes' inheritance.

Deferred //This year, maybe, do you think I can graduate? I'm already two years late. Dropped out six months when I was seven, a year when I was eleven, then got put back when we come North. To get through high at twenty's kind of late--- But maybe this year I can graduate. // Maybe now I can have that white enamel stove I dreamed about when we first fell in love eighteen years ago. But you know, rooming and everything then kids, cold-water flat and all that. But now my daughter's married And my boy's most grown--- quit school to work--- and where we're moving there ain't no stove--- Maybe I can buy that white enamel stove! //Me, I always did want to study French. It don't make sense--- I'll never go to France, but night schools teach French. Now at last I've got a job where I get off at five, in time to wash and dress, so, s'il vous plaît, I'll study French! // Someday, I'm gonna buy two new suits at once! //All I want is one more bottle of gin. // All I want is to see my furniture paid for. //All I want is a wife who will work with me and not against me. Say, baby, could you see your way clear? // Heaven, heaven, is my home! This world I'll leave behind When I set my feet in glory I'll have a throne for mine! //I want to pass the civil service. // I want a television set. //You know, as old as I am, I ain't never owned a decent radio yet? // I'd like to take up Bach. // Montage of a dream deferred. // Buddy, have you heard? [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

With the advent of the section entitled "Montage of a Dream Deferred" now assuming prime place in Hughes' 1959 //Selected Poems//, the profound impact of Whitman's curatorial and reflexive style of publishing begins to manifest itself explicitly in Hughes' own habits. Whitman went through several reincarnations of his works over the years, producing in particular multiple editions of //Leaves of Grass// that evolved dramatically in content over the course of history; this time-shift is equally reflected in the ways in which Whitman would reshape the combinations of his poems to evoke a particular mood or message––such as for instance, his choice after the outbreak of the Civil War to always conclude his compilation with the prophetic rallying-cry poem that is //[[So Long!->WhitmanSoLong]]//. Hughes likewise adopts this thematic cluster technique, just as he also adopts Whitman's beloved phrase "//So Long//", and echoes it's sentiment across his 1959 //Selected Poems//. Here in "Montage of a Dream Deferred", Hughes allows himself to delve with specificity into the implications of the continued deferral of what he and Whitman equally perceive as [[the cardinal truths of America->true theory]].

*** He has learned from Whitman that "[[So Long->So Long!]]" is indeed "in the song" of America, with deferral woven into the American dream for blacks. America's ideals hold out the promise of rights for everyone, liberty and prosperity and self-determination, but America's history of racism continually defers realization, placing "so long" between the present failed history and the future realized dream. *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

*** In this short "So Long" poem, which can be read as a blues lost-love poem as well as a critique of American history, Hughes again evokes foreign language, as if his language of deferral is beyond comprehension, as if something has been lost in the translation of America's promises when they are applied to blacks. *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//" The disjuncture of lived experiences once again brings us back to Hughes' [[Afro-American Fragment]], and the fundamental tension, violence, and contradictions that Hughes identifies as lying at the heart of the African American state of being.

The tight rhythmic structure and consistent yet malleable rhyme scheme of this poem establish it firmly within the soul and blues heritage of African American cultural production and artistic canon. Its disruptions and repetitions, especially across the final lines, not only contextualise its genre in this way, but additionally compound the sense of rupture and miscommunication; the apparent loss in translation of the American Dream and [[promise of freedom to all->EmProc]] hovers just out of reach, as the speaker of the poem appears to grasp hazily through the loose poetic form in the direction of the unnamed second-person "you", who is at once invisibly lingering, yet certainly departed and beyond recapturing.

On July 4, 1953, Hughes wrote on Whitman in the //Chicago Defender//, praising Whitman as the "greatest of American poets" whom "Negroes should read and remember", and saying that //Leaves of Grass// "contains the greatest poetic statements of the real meaning of democracy ever made on our shores." However, this reading was promptly attacked by critics who pointed to racialised aspects of Whitman's works tht read as reductive or degrading depictions of the plight of African Americans in the United States of his day; thus forcing Hughes to concede that "Great people are not gods", in his responding article, //"Like Whitman, Great Artists are Not Always Good People".// *** This //Defender// incident prompted Hughes to write his 1964 poem about Whitman, that famously celebrates the seeking quality of the poet, who was himself frustrated by not finding what he was seeking, by the "so long" quality of the American democratic experiment, but whom Hughes admired precisely because he did not allow the frustration to stop him from continuing to seek." *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

*** The finding, Hughes suggests, can only come if the seeking continues, though the extended deferral, he warns in [[a number->Harlem]] of his "[[Montage->Montage of a Dream Deferred]]" poems, could well lead to another violent explosion, as it did in the 1860s, and as indeed it would again in the 1960s, soon after Hughes' Selected Poems appeared. *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

*** Screaming electric, the atmosphere using, At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, Swiftly on, but a little while alighting, Curious envelop’d messages delivering, Sparkles hot, seed ethereal, down in the dirt dropping, Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring, To ages, and ages yet, the growth of the seed leaving, To troops out of me, out of the army, the war arising—they the tasks I have set promulging, To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing—their affection me more clearly explaining, To young men my problems offering—no dallier I—I the muscle of their brains trying, So I pass—a little time vocal, visible, contrary; Afterward, a melodious echo, passionately bent for—(death making me really undying;) The best of me then when no longer visible—for toward that I have been incessantly preparing. *** ––from "[[//So Long!//->WhitmanSoLong]], Whitman, //Leaves of Grass//, 1860. Langston Hughes in his poem 'Old Walt' is quite explicitly paying homage to the "seeking and finding" quest and quality of the poetry seen as the progenitor of all modern American literature that ensued. In particular however, we can see the skill with which he adapts the same frenzied tone as Whitman's own at times, in the sustained transitory mode of the present participle, and the circular repetitions of individual words. Hughes appears to isolate both the core trait and technique of Whitman's at hand here, and distills them potently in his own tribute.

*** In //Selected Poems//, Hughs puts "Old Walt" in the cluster of poems he calls "Distance Nowhere", a sequence exploring how getting from "here" to "there" really involves a "distance" that is "nowhere". The finding is in the seeking, even if the found never appears. *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//" (See accompanying poem: [[Border Line]] ) With this poem then, alongside its brethren, Hughes draws closer to expounding upon the tantalising distance and deferral that taunts both reader and poet alike, holding a utopic vision of America inherited from Whitman's own poetic searches out before us, but still just beyond reach. Neither past nor present can exist within this paradigm, while the future remains unfathomable––and so we begin to question the multifaceted nature of, for instance, just how [["far away / is Africa"->Afro-American Fragment]].

*** Hughes concludes that though time-distanced and not fully understood, Africa is nevertheless a potent reality in the Afro-American soul-psyche, a conclusion which carries an implicit optimisim, an expectation of conscious rediscovery and recovery of the African heritage in the future. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

Hughes, as all prolific poets, here can be seen to access an arguably universalised theme: death, which slips in and out of focus throughout his poems, a vision of the future that is all-too-easily forgotten by the younger generation, yet constantly reminded by the bloodied history and dusty literary heritage that weights upon the poet's shoulders. [[See The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and its links to Whitmanian preoccupations of mortality and the life of a nation.->TNSoRlight]]

*** "Border Line", in Fields of Wonder (1947), probably had ts emotional birth in December 1947 in the French village of Tour de Carol, just across the border from war-embattled Spain. The final pages of //I Wonder// record Hughes's thoughts as he sat...: "What a difference a border makes: on one siede of an invisible line, food; on the other side, none. On one side, peace; on the other side, war. *** –– J. A. Emanuel, //Langston Hughes//, 1967, Twayne Hughes muses throughout this poem on the arbitrary distinctions and expressions of the human experience; conveyed in the shades of meaning throughout the mortality and despondency that seems to swirl together here. However, despite the ostensibly universalised theme, this contemplation of death bears critical connection to many interconnected ideas, ranging from Whitman's American ideology and embrace of death as a means of aspiring for the future; in addition to the violence endured by black bodies in a hostile America.

*** "A poem, I think, should be the distilled essence of an emotion––the shorter the better." *** –– Langston Hughes, at the National Poetry Festival at the National Library of Congress, October 24, 1962.

*** Remembered partly as the source of Lorraine Hansberry's title for the play "Raisin in the Sun", "Harlem" traces in figurative language the long scar of psychic abuse which might, it emphasises, develop a fatally eruptive itch. *** –– J. A. Emanuel, //Langston Hughes//, 1967, Twayne

As the poetry-cycle draws closer to a close, Hughes resorts now to direct and open questions, that both he and the reader grapple with in unison, until he passes on the baton to us as the lines finally reach their end. We see here how the [[preoccupations of Whitman->true theory]] and the question of the consequences of America's broken promises to its citizens of African heritage are here brought to the fore. However in this process, the low threat still persists that the answers may disintegrate, or intensify and explode. //See//: [["Raisin in the Sun".->a raisin in the sun]]

*** The images are sensory, domestic, earthy, like blues images. The stress is on deterioration––drying, rotting, festering, souring––on loss of essential (colour:red)[natural quality]... The Afro-American is not unlike the raisin, for he is in a sense a dessicated trunk of his original African self, used and abandoned in the American wilderness with the stipulation that he rot and disappear. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press *** "I announce (colour:red)[natural persons] to arise, I announce justice triumphant, I announce uncompromising liberty and equality, I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of pride." *** –– Whitman, //So Long!//, //Leaves of Grass//, 1860.

The banality and domesticity of these decaying images continues to creep to the front of the picture; a corruption of the wholesome familial lexis that is written into the fabric of modern American culture and society; and in many ways a metaphor for the ruin of the current estrangement of Black and White America, viable as viewed from two perspectives. Firstly, that of white America, that views blackness as the corrosive force that is to be blamed for its own demise and quarantined at arm's length away from a state of coexistence. Secondly, the rising tension stemming from profound inequality that impoverishes both black and white America in turn for the loss of opportunity and self-betterment, but that above all threatens to continue escalating if left unresolved until the day it eventually reaches a fever-pitch and shall explode. This sense of rising tension can be clearly imagined with the backdrop of a 1959 publication date just before the revolutionary peak of the Civil Rights Movement.

*** In short, a dream deferred can be a terrifying thing. Its greatest threat is its unpredictability, and for this reason the question format is especially fitting. Questions demand the reader's participation, corner and sweep [them] headlong to the final, inescapable conclusion... The question starts with the relatively innocuous raisin, and aided by the relentless repetition of "Does it..?" intensifies until the violent crescendo at the end. With the explosion comes the ultimate ephiphany: that the deadly poison of the deferred dream, which had seemed so neatly localized (...) does in fact seep into the mainstream from which the larger society drinks. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

*** "Rotten meat is a lynched black man rotting on the tree. A sweet gone bad is all of the broken promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction,of the Great Migration, integration and voter registration, of Black Studies and Equal Opportunity. It might even be possible to identify ech of the key images with a generation or historical period, but this is not necessary: the deferred dream appears in these and similar guises in every generatiion and in the experience of individuals as well as of the group. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

For all it's equivocation, Hughes' //Harlem// is, as Ed Folsom described it, "prophetic". As it introduces the critical question of the "dream deferred" that shall be expounded upon throughout the "Montage" series, Hughes plucks imagery that resonates across Whitman's verse in addition to his own vision of contemporary America. *** I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. ... Houses and rooms are (colour:red)[full of perfumes], the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.... ... I am (colour:red)[the hounded slave], I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the (colour:red)[ooze of my skin], ... (colour:red)[My sun has his sun] and round him obediently wheels, He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, And greater sets follow, (colour:red)[making specks of the greatest] inside them. *** –– Whitman, //Song of Myself// These images selected point to the intertextuality of the words chosen by Hughes here; but furthermore, help to reinforce the thematic ties as he responds to the claims and promises and warnings of Whitman's own era. While Whitman uses his poem //Song of Myself// to flit across the divides of social stratification, to champion the unity that can bring "the Prostitute" to stand swearing "blackguard oaths" within just a few lines reach from "the President". Hughes however takes his curt verse to ruminate on the congealing state of inequality, singing his own blues anthems back to Whitman's words and tune that speak to the truth of the African American experience in his eyes. [[Click here to see Whitman's full original poem, //Song of Myself//->Song of Myself]]

As the title and opening lines echo Whitman's century-old words as a refrain, the faceless second-person who continues to elude the poet throughout these verses can likewise be thought of as an address to Walt Whitman himself. "Old Walt", whom Hughes has [[elsewhere equally observed->Old Walt]] and considered directly, has indeed now been gone "so long" –– to the extent that now, his poetry that once promised "justice triumphant...uncompromising liberty and equality" for all [[(See : //So Long!//)->WhitmanSoLong]], sounds more like a "foreign language" to Hughes than a comprehensible declaration or description of American life as he knows it.

*** "Hughes was always fascinated with that vast, expanding, inclusive Whitman "I" that welcomed diversity and contained contradiction. In preparing a 1946 children's anthology of Whitman's poetry for the Marxist International Publishers, Hughes wrote in his introduction that Whitman was "one of the greatest 'I' poets of all time," but emphasized that "Whitman's 'I' is not the 'I' of the introspective versifiers who write always and only about themselves. Rather it is the cosmic 'I' of all peoples who seek freedom, decency, and dignity, friendship, and equality between individuals and races all over the world." *** –– Ed Folsom, "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//" For more on Hughes's use of the Whitmanian first-person and his centring of African American subjectivity, see again "[[The Negro Speaks of Rivers]], and its employment of [[poetic persona->TNSoR"I"]]

*** "I, Too" sets the tone for the final cluster of "Selected Poems" and leads to a bracing series of poems that track, one final time, the problems of African American identity ("What I lack/Black,/Caught in a crack/That splits the world in two") and the frustration of dream deferral ("Democracy will not come/Today, this year/Nor ever/Through compromise and fear/...I tire so of hearing people say, "Let things take their course./Tomorrow is another day.) *** –– Ed Folsom, "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

*** The poem reiterates one of his leading themes...American identity of necessity embraces equally both the white and the black experience. Those two experiences interpenetrate, are defined one by the other, even though neither group relishes the idea. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

Walt Whitman 1855 SONG OF MYSELF (reproduced from the Walt Whitman Archive) 1 I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. 2 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 30] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the pass- ing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. 3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the begin- ning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 31] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead? 4 Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 32] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. 5 I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 33] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed. 6 A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 34] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and chil- dren? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. 7 Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth, I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.) Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female, For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted, For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers, For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears, For me children and the begetters of children. Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no, And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 35] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 8 The little one sleeps in its cradle, I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill, I peeringly view them from the top. The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor, The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls, The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs, The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital, The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall, The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd, The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes, What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits, What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes, What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum, Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips, I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart. 9 The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready, The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon, The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged, The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow. I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 36] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 10 Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee, In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night, Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill'd game, Falling asleep on the gather'd leaves with my dog and gun by my side. The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud, My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck. The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me, I tuck'd my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time; You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle. I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders, On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand, She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to her feet. The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd feet, And gave him a room that enter'd from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd north, I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 37] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 11 Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bend- ing arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray. 12 The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down. Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil, Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire. From the cinder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements, The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms, Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure, They do not hasten, each man hits in his place. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 38] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 13 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain, The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois'd on one leg on the string-piece, His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band, His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead, The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish'd and perfect limbs. I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there, I go with the team also. In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing, To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object miss- ing, Absorbing all to myself and for this song. Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble, They rise together, they slowly circle around. I believe in those wing'd purposes, And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me, And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional, And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else, And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me, And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me. 14 The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation, The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close, Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 39] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The sharp-hoof'd moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog, The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings, I see in them and myself the same old law. The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, They scorn the best I can do to relate them. I am enamour'd of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me, Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns, Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me, Not asking the sky to come down to my good will, Scattering it freely forever. 15 The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanks- giving dinner, The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready, The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar, The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye, The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case, (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;) The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manu- script; The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 40] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;) The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee, As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle, The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their part- ners, the dancers bow to each other, The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the musical rain, The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron, The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm'd cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale, The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways, As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers, The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots, The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child, The clean-hair'd Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill, The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter's lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold, The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread, The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him, The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions, The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!) The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray, The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser hig- gling about the odd cent;) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 41] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly, The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open'd lips, The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;) The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries, On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms, The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold, The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle, As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change, The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar, In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers; Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather'd, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!) Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground; Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees, Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain'd by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grand- sons around them, In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 42] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, And of these one and all I weave the song of myself. 16 I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine, One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same, A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tack- ing, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch, Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (lov- ing their big proportions,) Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat, A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. I resist any thing better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place. (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place, The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 43] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 17 These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe. 18 With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! 19 This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appoint- ments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited, The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited; There shall be no difference between them and the rest. This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair, This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning, This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face, This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 44] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has. Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they? This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. 20 Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, Else it were time lost listening to me. I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, con- formity goes to the fourth-remov'd, I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious? Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel'd with doctors and calculated close, I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 45] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night. I know I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, I see that the elementary laws never apologize, (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.) I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is my- self, And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time. 21 I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. I chant the chant of dilation or pride, We have had ducking and deprecating about enough, I show that size is only development. Have you outstript the rest? are you the President? It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on. I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 46] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Press close bare-bosom'd night—press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! Still nodding night—mad naked summer night. Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow'd earth—rich apple-blossom'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes. Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love! O unspeakable passionate love. 22 You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me, We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. Sea of stretch'd ground-swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd yet always-ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others' arms. I am he attesting sympathy, (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?) I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 47] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown. Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy? Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work'd over and rectified? I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance, Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine, Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start. This minute that comes to me over the past decillions, There is no better than it and now. What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder, The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel. 23 Endless unfolding of words of ages! And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse. A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time abso- lutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing. Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration! Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac, This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches, These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas. This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician. Gentlemen, to you the first honors always! Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling, I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 48] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Less the reminders of properties told my words, And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication, And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt, And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire. 24 Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the cur- rent and index. I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their coun- terpart of on the same terms. Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd. I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 49] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it, Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you! Firm masculine colter it shall be you! Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you! You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions! Root of wash'd sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! Mix'd tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you! Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you! Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you! Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you! Hands I have taken, face I have kiss'd, mortal I have ever touch'd, it shall be you. I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy, I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish, Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friend- ship I take again. That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be, A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the meta- physics of books. To behold the day-break! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows, The air tastes good to my palate. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 50] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding, Scooting obliquely high and low. Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs, Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven. The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction, The heav'd challenge from the east that moment over my head, The mocking taunt. See then whether you shall be master! 25 Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me. We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun, We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the day- break. My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds. Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then? Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation, Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded? Waiting in gloom, protected by frost, The dirt receding before my prophetical screams, I underlying causes to balance them at last, My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things, Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.) My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 51] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 26 Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals, I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night, Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals, The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick, The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronoun- cing a death-sentence, The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters, The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streak- ing engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights, The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars, The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two, (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,) I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music—this suits me. A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me, The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full. I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?) The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them, It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent waves, I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 52] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death, At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, And that we call Being. 27 To be in any form, what is that? (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,) If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. Mine is no callous shell, I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand. 28 Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity, Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself, On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs, Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, Depriving me of my best as for a purpose, Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture- fields, Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me, No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger, Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while, Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me. The sentries desert every other part of me, They have left me helpless to a red marauder, They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me. I am given up by traitors, I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 53] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there. You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat, Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me. 29 Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch! Did it make you ache so, leaving me? Parting track'd by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan, Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward. Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital, Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden. 30 All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch?) Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so, Only what nobody denies is so.) A minute and a drop of me settle my brain, I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps, And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman, And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other, And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific, And until one and all shall delight us, and we them. 31 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 54] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, But call any thing back again when I desire it. In vain the speeding or shyness, In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach, In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones, In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes, In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low, In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky, In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs, In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods, In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador, I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. 32 I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession. I wonder where they get those tokens, Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 55] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Myself moving forward then and now and forever, Gathering and showing more always and with velocity, Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them, Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers, Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms. A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears, Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving. His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him, His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return. I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion, Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them? Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you. 33 Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at, What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass, What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed, And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning. My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision. By the city's quadrangular houses—in log huts, camping with lumbermen, Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed, Weeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests, Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase, Scorch'd ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river, Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter, Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish, Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 56] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail; Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower'd cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field, Over the sharp-peak'd farm house, with its scallop'd scum and slender shoots from the gutters, Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav'd corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax, Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest, Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze; Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs, Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush, Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot, Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold- bug drops through the dark, Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow, Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shud- dering of their hides, Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters; Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders, Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs, Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it my- self and looking composedly down,) Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand, Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it, Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke, Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water, Where the half-burn'd brig is riding on unknown currents, Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupt- ing below; Where the dense-starr'd flag is borne at the head of the regiments, Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island, Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance, Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside, Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 57] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter, At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw, At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find, At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings; Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps, Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter'd, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel, Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen, Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks, Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie, Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near, Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long- lived swan is curving and winding, Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh, Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds, Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out, Where burial coaches enter the arch'd gates of a cemetery, Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees, Where the yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs, Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon, Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well, Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves, Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs, Through the gymnasium, through the curtain'd saloon, through the office or public hall; Pleas'd with the native and pleas'd with the foreign, pleas'd with the new and old, Pleas'd with the homely woman as well as the handsome, Pleas'd with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously, Pleas'd with the tune of the choir of the whitewash'd church, Pleas'd with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preach- er, impress'd seriously at the camp-meeting; - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 58] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass, Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn'd up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach, My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle; Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek'd bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,) Far from the settlements studying the print of animals' feet, or the moccasin print, By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient, Nigh the coffin'd corpse when all is still, examining with a candle; Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any, Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him, Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while, Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side, Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, Speeding with tail'd meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest, Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads. I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product, And look at quintillions ripen'd and look at quintillions green. I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul, My course runs below the soundings of plummets. I help myself to material and immaterial, No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me. I anchor my ship for a little while only, My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me. I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike- pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue. I ascend to the foretruck, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 59] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I take my place late at night in the crow's-nest, We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough, Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty, The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions, The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them, We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged, We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution, Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin'd city, The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe. I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires, I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself, I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips. My voice is the wife's voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs, They fetch my man's body up dripping and drown'd. I understand the large hearts of heroes, The courage of present times and all times, How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm, How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faith ful of days and faithful of nights, And chalk'd in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you; How he follow'd with them and tack'd with them three days and would not give it up, How he saved the drifting company at last, How the lank loose-gown'd women look'd when boated from the side of their prepared graves, How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp- lipp'd unshaved men; All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine, I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there. The disdain and calmness of martyrs, The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on, The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blow- ing, cover'd with sweat, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 60] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the mur- derous buckshot and the bullets, All these I feel or am. I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marks- men, I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin, I fall on the weeds and stones, The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close, Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks. Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken, Tumbling walls buried me in their debris, Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my com- rades, I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels, They have clear'd the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth. I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake, Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy, White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps, The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. Distant and dead resuscitate, They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself. I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort's bombardment, I am there again. Again the long roll of the drummers, Again the attacking cannon, mortars, Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive. I take part, I see and hear the whole, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 61] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim'd shots, The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip, Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs, The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explo- sion, The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air. Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand, He gasps through the clot Mind not me—mind—the entrench- ments. 34 Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth, (I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,) 'Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. Retreating they had form'd in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks, Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy's, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance, Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone, They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv'd writing and seal, gave up their arms and march'd back prisoners of war. They were the glory of the race of rangers, Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship, Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate, Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters, Not a single one over thirty years of age. The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer, The work commenced about five o'clock and was over by eight. None obey'd the command to kneel, Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight, A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together, The maim'd and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw hem there, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 62] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Some half-kill'd attempted to crawl away, These were despatch'd with bayonets or batter'd with the blunts of muskets, A youth not seventeen years old seiz'd his assassin till two more came to release him, The three were all torn and cover'd with the boy's blood. At eleven o'clock began the burning of the bodies; That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men. 35 Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me. Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us. We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch'd, My captain lash'd fast with his own hands. We had receiv'd some eighteen pound shots under the water, On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead. Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark, Ten o'clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported, The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust. Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 63] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Only three guns are in use, One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy's main- mast, Two well serv'd with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks. The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top, They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. Not a moment's cease, The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder- magazine. One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us. 36 Stretch'd and still lies the midnight, Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer'd, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv'd in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl'd whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining, Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 64] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, these irretrievable. 37 You laggards there on guard! look to your arms! In at the conquer'd doors they crowd! I am possess'd! Embody all presences outlaw'd or suffering, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain. For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch, It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night. Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side, (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.) Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced. Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp, My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat. Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them, I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg. 38 Enough! enough! enough! Somehow I have been stunn'd. Stand back! Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head, slumbers, dreams, gaping, I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake. That I could forget the mockers and insults! That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludg- eons and hammers! That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 65] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I remember now, I resume the overstaid fraction, The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves, Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me. I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average unending procession, Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines, Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth, The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years. Eleves, I salute you! come forward! Continue your annotations, continue your questionings. 39 The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it? Is he some Southwesterner rais'd out-doors? is he Kanadian? Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California? The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea? Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him, They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them. Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb'd head, laughter, and naivetè, Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and ema- nations, They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers, They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes. 40 Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask—lie over! You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also. Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands, Say, old top-knot, what do you want? Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 66] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot, And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days. Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself. You there, impotent, loose in the knees, Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you, Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets, I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare, And any thing I have I bestow. I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me, You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you. To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean, On his right cheek I put the family kiss, And in my soul I swear I never will deny him. On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes, (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.) To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door, Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed, Let the physician and the priest go home. I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will, O despairer, here is my neck, By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me. I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up, Every room of the house do I fill with an arm'd force, Lovers of me, bafflers of graves. Sleep—I and they keep guard all night, Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you, I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself, And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so. 41 I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs, And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 67] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I heard what was said of the universe, Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all? Magnifying and applying come I, Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson, Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image, Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more, Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days, (They bore mites as for unfledg'd birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,) Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see, Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house, Putting higher claims for him there with his roll'd-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel, Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation, Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars, Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr'd laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames; By the mechanic's wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born, Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg'd out at their waists, The snag-tooth'd hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come, Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery; What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then, The bull and the bug never worshipp'd half enough, Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream'd, The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes, The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious; - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 68] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator, Putting myself here and now to the ambush'd womb of the shadows. 42 A call in the midst of the crowd, My own voice, orotund sweeping and final. Come my children, Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates, Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass'd his prelude on the reeds within. Easily written loose-finger'd chords—I feel the thrum of your climax and close. My head slues round on my neck, Music rolls, but not from the organ, Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine. Ever the hard unsunk ground, Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides, Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real, Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn'd thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts, Ever the vexer's hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth, Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life, Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death. Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking, To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning, Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going. Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for pay- ment receiving, A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate. The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail'd coats, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 69] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,) I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me, What I do and say the same waits for them, Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them. I know perfectly well my own egotism, Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less, And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself. Not words of routine this song of mine, But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring; This printed and bound book—but the printer and the printing- office boy? The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms? The black ship mail'd with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets— but the pluck of the captain and engineers? In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes? The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way? The saints and sages in history—but you yourself? Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain, And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life? 43 I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over, My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern, Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun, Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist, Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran, Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 70] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me, Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits. One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey. Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded, Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical, I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief. How the flukes splash! How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood! Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers, I take my place among you as much as among any, The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same, And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same. I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail. Each who passes is consider'd, each who stops is consider'd, not a single one can it fail. It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried, Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side, Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again, Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall, Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad dis- order, Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd, nor the brutish koboo call'd the ordure of humanity, Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in, Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 71] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them, Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known. 44 It is time to explain myself—let us stand up. What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. Births have brought us richness and variety, And other births will bring us richness and variety. I do not call one greater and one smaller, That which fills its period and place is equal to any. Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister? I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me, All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation, (What have I to do with lamentation?) I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be. My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs, On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount. Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. Long I was hugg'd close—long and long. Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 72] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it. For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long slow strata piled to rest it on, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care. All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me, Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul. 45 O span of youth! ever-push'd elasticity! O manhood, balanced, florid and full. My lovers suffocate me, Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin, Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night, Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head, Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush, Lighting on every moment of my life, Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine. Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days! Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself, And the dark hush promulges as much as any. I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 73] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels, He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them. There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage, If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run, We should surely bring up again where we now stand, And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther. A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient, They are but parts, any thing is but a part. See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain, The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms, The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there. 46 I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured. I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 74] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me, For after we start we never lie by again. This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself. Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence. Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. 47 I am the teacher of athletes, He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own, He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 75] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts, First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo, Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers, And those well-tann'd to those that keep out of the sun. I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me? I follow you whoever you are from the present hour, My words itch at your ears till you understand them. I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat, (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd.) I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house, And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air. If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore, The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key, The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words. No shutter'd room or school can commune with me, But roughs and little children better than they. The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well, The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day, The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice, In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them. The soldier camp'd or upon the march is mine, On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them, On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 76] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My face rubs to the hunter's face when he lies down alone in his blanket, The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon, The young mother and old mother comprehend me, The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are, They and all would resume what I have told them. 48 I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 77] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 49 And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes, I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting, I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors, And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape. And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons. And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven, O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and pro- motions, If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing? Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest, Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight, Toss, sparkles of day and dusk—toss on the black stems that decay in the muck, Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs. I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night, I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected, And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small. 50 There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. Wrench'd and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes, I sleep—I sleep long. I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 78] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness. 51 The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late? 52 The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

*** "I, Too" is as stoical as it is affirmative. Hughes accepts the brotherhood of black and white as beyond question. In addition, white and mulatto are brothers by immediate blood. The "darker brother" is America's secret shame, the kitchen his secret kingdom. Banished from polite company, he laughs, transforming his "yeah" into a "nay", as the grandfather in "Invisible Man" advised.... The domestic context lends mythic depth to the poem; for what we are witnessing is the career of the young prince dispossessed and suppressed by his wicked relatives. The certainty of his return and reinstatement is foretold in the archetypes. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

//"I celebrate myself, and (colour:Red)[sing myself], And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. (colour:Red)[My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil], this air, (colour:Red)[Born here] of parents born here (colour:Red)[from parents the same], and their parents the same,..."// –– Walt Whitman, //Song of Myself//, 1855 Hughes' poem "I, Too" echoes as a direct response to Whitman's "Song of Myself". Hughes pushes back against popular consciousness in the same vein as the civil rights movement to demand recognition of African American citizenship as part of th same direct heritage as Whitman. However, while Whitman sings confidently as "himself", with America and all that this entail immediately assumed and wrapped up within, Hughes finds himself bound to qualify that he "too" can "sing America"––unable to articulate this potion of identity as fully or unilaterally himself; alluding to the inevitable fragmentation of Black American identity as interrogated throughout his //Selected Poems//, introduced from the start with his cluster and eponymous poem, [[Afro-American Fragment]]. [[To read Whitman's full original poem, click here->Song of Myself]] For more on Hughes' use of Whitman's //Song of Myself//, read //[[Harlem]]// and [[other thoughts here->Maybe]].

***The black man's roots in American soil are as deep, indeed deeper than the roots of most whites. Therefore Hughes, too, celebrates America, but [[unlike Whitman->Song of Myself]], not for the America that is, but the America that is to come. The democratic vistas which Whitman saw all about him are, to Hughes, still distant on the horizon, and yet to be. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

*** Then comes the concluson, "Freedom's Plow", and it evokes one final time the seeking and finding Old Walt but again does so without naming him... *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

*** Hughes traces American history, beginning with the ships of European settlers and the ships bearing African slaves, traces how the land was plowed as "white hands and black hands,/Held the plow handles." *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

//America is a dream. The poet says it was promises. The people say it is promises-that will come true. The people do not always say things out loud, Nor write them down on paper. // We see Hughes call again upon the legacy of Whitman's hopeful swan-song, [[//So Long!//->WhitmanSoLong]] –– he calls into question when the truth of the American Dream will be applied to the reality of the African American experience, and when the dream "[[deferred->Harlem]]" will at last see its first day dawning.

What leaps to our attention from the outset of this poem is the studied distance with which Hughes eases the reader into the violent course of American history. He opens with the universal, speaking neither in racialised terms, nor even in personalised terms –– a generic embodiment of all human aspiration and longing that spans beyond, yet nonetheless encompasses, the [[elusive dream->WhitmanSoLong]] of American liberty. For more on Hughes' use of personal pronouns and poetic voice see //[[The Negro Speaks of Rivers]]//, and //[[I, Too]]//.

*** Echoing Whitman right down to the exclamation points, Hughes prepares his readers for a long and rough journey through a continuing American history, one that will require faith in the seed that has been planted, faith that the tree will someday shade all races, all peoples. The old "gospel plow" of the spiritual has now been replaced by a more ambiguous and activist plow, because the promised future is no longer the afterlife promised by the old gospel religion, the afterlife that kept so many slaves docile as they suffered through this life because they had been assured their payoff would come in eternity as long as they remained subservient here. Now, though, Freedom's Plow insists this prize is in this world, a freedom to be realised in history, in America, in the world. It hasn't come quickly or easily, adn it won't. It will still take "[[so long.->WhitmanSoLong]]" It will require us to "hold on." And the pay-off is still unsure: our history is leading us, as Whitman put it to an America that will (colour:red)["evolve to noble fruition or end as an incommensurable disaster"]. It's a wild, unpredictable long ride, with a clear destination but no map. Hold on, so long! *** –– Ed Folsom, in his essay "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//"

*** ...By 1943, Hughes had indeed beat a tactical retreat––but only in his collected works––from the broad-based multiracial Marxist workers' platform, to concentrate once more on black people's particular American dream, without specifying an ideology or method for fulfilling that dream. In these two later pamphlets he focusses most closely on America's avowed principles, and the contradiction between those principles and the oppression of blacks. The dominant mood is bewilderment, the tone is hurt. *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

*** Hughes takes America's democratic rhetoric seriously. Nowhere is he more patently patriotic. These poems pick up where "[[I, Too]], sing America" left off. They are protest poems in the classic sense, addressed to white America, and not so much to their hearts as to their heads. The poet attempts to reason with white folks. He urges them to return America to its first principles. There might even be no need to go hunting for foreign ideologies. The blueprint is right here at home, it's just a matter of building upon it: (colour:red)["The plan and the pattern is here, Woven from the beginning Into the warp and woof of America."] *** –– Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press

*** Hughes's long wartime poem, patriotically narrates how Negro slaves dreamed and worked to build and spiritualize America. The combination of militancy and hopefulness subserves the national emergency: but the dogged march from slavery to freedom, heralded by a song born of war, gives real fiber to the poem. The song itself, made up by slaves, gives robustness to the refrain: "Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!" *** –– J. A. Emanuel, //Langston Hughes//, 1967, Twayne

*** Poems of hope are, and ought to be, popular among a writer's followers when written with compelling imagination and sincerity... "Freedom's Plow tells in seven pages the importance of vision ("First in the heart is the dream"); of creative cooperation ("labor––white hands and black hands"); of faith in the public ("The people often hold/Great thoughts in their deepest hearts"); and of broad perspective ("That plow plowed a new furrow/Across the field of history".) *** –– J. A. Emanuel, //Langston Hughes//, 1967, Twayne

*** "Freedom's Plow": First published in Opportunity (April 1943), pp. 66-69. Printed as a pamphlet in 1943 by Musette Publishers. Reprinted in LHR and SP . Hughes made extensive changes in the stanza and line lengths of the poem from its first appearance to the final version in SP , often simply cutting in half earlier verses. Hughes deleted one line from the first version. This deleted line ("The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles") appeared after line 16. He also reversed the order of lines 184-89, which originally read: To all the enemies of the great words: FREEDOM, BROTHERHOOD, DEMOCRACY We say, NO! Changes were also made in lines 198-99, where a clause was dropped: That tree is not for Negroes alone, But for everybody, for all America, for all the world. *** –– from //The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes//, Arnold Rampersad, Editor; David Roessel, Associate Editor (1995), Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

*** Between 1920 and 1950...several poems employ Negro history. "October 16" in Opportunity in 1931 points to Negro participation in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, as "Freedom's Plow". Sometimes a single line appealing to Negro historical consciousness transforms a poem. *** –– J. A. Emanuel, //Langston Hughes//, 1967, Twayne

''Selected Poems of Langston Hughes: An Interactive Edition'' //“So Long!” to “Hold On!”: Whitmanian Dreaming & African American Imaginaries// by Laurence Bashford Presented in partial fulfillment of the course requirements for ENGL 438 Performing American Literature, Spring 2017. Special thanks to Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Ed Folsom for their assistance, guidance, and inspiration. *** Bibliography & Sources Cited: *** – Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967, from //The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes//: ed. A Rampersad & D. Roessel, (1995), Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. - Hughes, Langston, //Selected Poems//, 1959, New York - Whitman, Walt, //Leaves of Grass//, 1860 edition ``(accessed: 4 May 2017, the Walt Whitman Archive, http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/whole.html)``. - J. A. Emanuel, //Langston Hughes//, 1967, Twayne - Ed Folsom, "//So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing//", in Walt Whitman: Where the Future Becomes Present, ed. M. Robertson, 2008 – Onwuchekwa Jemie, //Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry.// Copyright © 1976 by Columbia University Press – George Hutchinson, //The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White//, Copyright © 1995 by the President and Board of Fellows of Harvard College. – George B. Hutchinson, //Langston Hughes and the "Other" Whitman// in //The Continuing presence of Walt Whitman: the life after the life// (ed.Robert K. Martin), 1992, Iowa.

''Afro-American Fragment'': [[Afro-American Fragment]] ~ [[The Negro Speaks of Rivers]] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]

''Distance Nowhere:'' [[Border Line]] ~ [[Old Walt]] [[(Back to Table of Contents)->Title]]