To Walt Whitman in America

Send but a song oversea for us,Heart of their hearts who are free,Heart of their singer, to be for usMore than our singing can be;Ours, in the tempest at error,5With no light but the twilight of terror;Send us a song oversea!

Sweet-smelling of pine-leaves and grasses,And blown as a tree through and throughWith the winds of the keen mountain-passes,10And tender as sun-smitten dew;Sharp-tongued as the winter that shakesThe wastes of your limitless lakes,Wide-eyed as the sea-line's blue.

O strong-winged soul with prophetic15Lips hot with the bloodheats of song,With tremor of heartstrings magnetic,With thoughts as thunders in throng,With consonant ardours of chordsThat pierce men's souls as with swords20And hale them hearing along,

Make us too music, to be with usAs a word from a world's heart warm,To sail the dark as a sea with us,Full-sailed, outsinging the storm,25A song to put fire in our earsWhose burning shall burn up tears,Whose sign bid battle reform;

A note in the ranks of a clarion,A word in the wind of cheer,30To consume as with lightning the carrionThat makes time foul for us here;In the air that our dead things infestA blast of the breath of the west,Till east way as west way is clear.35

Out of the sun beyond sunset,From the evening whence morning shall be,With the rollers in measureless onset,With the van of the storming sea,With the world-wide wind, with the breath40That breaks ships driven upon death,With the passion of all things free,

With the sea-steeds footless and frantic,White myriads for death to bestrideIn the charge of the ruining Atlantic45Where deaths by regiments ride,With clouds and clamours of waters,With a long note shriller than slaughter'sOn the furrowless fields world-wide,

With terror, with ardour and wonder,50With the soul of the season that wakesWhen the weight of a whole year's thunderIn the tidestream of autumn breaks,Let the flight of the wide-winged wordCome over, come in and be heard,55Take form and fire for our sakes.

For a continent bloodless with travailHere toils and brawls as it can,And the web of it who shall unravelOf all that peer on the plan;60Would fain grow men, but they grow not,And fain be free, but they know notOne name for freedom and man?

One name, not twain for division;One thing, not twain, from the birth;65Spirit and substance and vision,Worth more than worship is worth;Unbeheld, unadored, undivined,The cause, the centre, the mind,The secret and sense of the earth.70

Here as a weakling in irons,Here as a weanling in bands,As a prey that the stake-net environs,Our life that we looked for stands;And the man-child naked and dear,75Democracy, turns on us hereEyes trembling with tremulous hands

It sees not what season shall bring to itSweet fruit of its bitter desire;Few voices it hears yet sing to it,80Few pulses of hearts reaspire;Foresees not time, nor forehearsThe noises of imminent years,Earthquake, and thunder, and fire:

When crowned and weaponed and curbless85It shall walk without helm or shieldThe bare burnt furrows and herblessOf war's last flame-stricken field,Till godlike, equal with time,It stand in the sun sublime,90In the godhead of man revealed.

Round your people and over themLight like raiment is drawn,Close as a garment to cover themWrought not of mail nor of lawn;95Here, with hope hardly to wear,Naked nations and bareSwim, sink, strike out for the dawn.

Chains are here, and a prison,Kings, and subjects, and shame;100If the God upon you be arisen,How should our songs be the same?How, in confusion of change,How shall we sing, in a strangeLand, songs praising his name?105

God is buried and dead to us,Even the spirit of earth,Freedom; so have they said to us,Some with mocking and mirth,Some with heartbreak and tears;110And a God without eyes, without ears,Who shall sing of him, dead in the birth?

The earth-god Freedom, the lonelyFace lightening, the footprint unshod,Not as one man crucified only115Nor scourged with but one life's rod;The soul that is substance of nations,Reincarnate with fresh generations;The great god Man, which is God.

But in weariest of years and obscurest120Doth it live not at heart of all things,The one God and one spirit, a purestLife, fed from unstanchable springs?Within love, within hatred it is,And its seed in the stripe as the kiss,125And in slaves is the germ, and in kings.

Freedom we call it, for holierName of the soul's there is none;Surelier it labours if slowlier,Than the metres of star or of sun;130Slowlier than life into breath,Surelier than time into death,It moves till its labour be done.

Till the motion be done and the measureCircling through season and clime,135Slumber and sorrow and pleasure,Vision of virtue and crime;Till consummate with conquering eyes,A soul disembodied, it riseFrom the body transfigured of time.140

Till it rise and remain and take stationWith the stars of the worlds that rejoice;Till the voice of its heart's exultationBe as theirs an invariable voice;By no discord of evil estranged,145By no pause, by no breach in it changed,By no clash in the chord of its choice.

It is one with the world's generations,With the spirit, the star, and the sod;With the kingless and king-stricken nations,150With the cross, and the chain, and the rod;The most high, the most secret, most lonely,The earth-soul Freedom, that onlyLives, and that only is God.