Gardens and Machines: The Whitman Field Recordings

Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself

(Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul.)

O amazement of things—even the least particle!

I too carol the sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting,

As I steam’d down the Mississippi,

As I went forth in the morning, as I beheld the light breaking in the east,

I sing to the last the equalities modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things,

For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,

O setting sun! though the time has come,

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine power to speak words;

Are you full-lung’d and limber-lipp’d from long trial? from vigorous practice? from physique?

Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?

Come duly to the divine power to speak words?

For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness,

After treading ground and breasting river and lake,

After a loosen’d throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes, 

After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing obstructions,

After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, woman, the divine power to speak words; 

Then toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten all—none refuse, all attend,

Armies, ships, antiquities, libraries, paintings, machines, cities, hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form in close ranks,

They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the mouth of that man or that woman.

Ever upon this stage,

Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content,

These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and rack’d by the war-strife,)

Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time refusing to give me up,

All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,

You have not seen that only such as they are for these States,

Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,

Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,

Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,

All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of these States, reminiscences, institutions,

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,

I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me,