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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Walt Whitman
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July 31 - August 17, 2023
All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems,
Our Old Feuillage
Fine poem. Love it!
Always our old feuillage!
Foliage.
Song of the Exposition
Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Responsive to our summons, Or rather to her long-nurs’d inclination, Join’d with an irresistible, natural gravitation, She comes! I hear the rustling of her gown, I scent the odor of her breath’s delicious fragrance, I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling, Upon this very scene.
She is Columbia. See highlight later on.
Calliope’s
Muse who presides over eloquence and epic poetry.
Clio,
The muse of history.
Melpo...
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The muse of tragedy.
T...
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The muse of comedy.
But hold — don’t I forget my manners? To introduce the stranger, (what else indeed do I live to chant for?) to thee Columbia;
We do not blame thee elder World, nor really separate ourselves from thee,
Following verses worship America, aka "Columbia".
Away with themes of war! away with war itself! Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated corpses! That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men, And in its stead speed industry’s campaigns, With thy undaunted armies, engineering, Thy pennants labor, loosen’d to the breeze, Thy bugles sounding loud and clear.
Away with old romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts, Away with love-verses sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers, Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide, The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few, With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers.
Work, work, work! No time-wasting frivolities.
To you ye reverent sane sisters, I raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for art, To exalt the present and the real, To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade,
Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation,
Song of the Redwood-Tree
Very moving.
A California song,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.
The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not, The quick-ear’d teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not, As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to join the refrain, But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but the future.
A Song for Occupations
There is something that comes to one now and perpetually, It is not what is printed, preach’d, discussed, it eludes discussion and print, It is not to be put in a book, it is not in this book, It is for you whoever you are, it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you, It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest, it is ever provoked by them.
We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same, If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be? The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums.
All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded b...
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Strange and hard that paradox true I give, Objects gross and the unseen soul are one.
House-building, measuring, sawing the boards,
Etc.
These shows all near you by day and night — workman! whoever you are, your daily life!
End.
When the psalm sings instead of the singer, When the script preaches instead of the preacher, When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that carved the supporting desk, When I can touch the body of books by night or by day, and when they touch my body back again, When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and child convince, When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman’s daughter, When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly companions, I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do of men and women like
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The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself, possesses still underneath,
To her children the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail,
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best,
I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best, I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.
Youth, Day, Old Age and Night
Youth, large, lusty, loving — youth full of grace, force, fascination, Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Manifest Destiny on steroids.
We primeval forests felling,
!!!
Year of Meteors [1859-60]
Interesting.
Her moving swiftly surrounded by myriads of small craft I forget not to sing; Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven, Nor the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting over our heads, (A moment, a moment long it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life
Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
