Longings for Home by Walt Whitman

O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!O dear to me my birth-things⁠—All moving things, and the trees where I wasborn⁠—thegrains,plants, rivers;Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silverysands,orthrough swamps;Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee,theCoosa, and the Sabine;O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again;Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes⁠—I float on the Okeechobee⁠—I crossthehummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests;I see the parrots in the woods⁠—I see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi;Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia⁠—I coast up the Carolinas,I see where the live-oak is growing⁠—I see where the yellow-pine, the scentedbay-tree, thelemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my visioninland;O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!The cactus, guarded with thorns⁠—the laurel-tree, with large white flowers;The range afar⁠—the richness and barrenness⁠—the old woods charged with mistletoeandtrailing moss,The piney odor and the gloom⁠—the awful natural stillness, (Here in these dense swampsthefreebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his conceal’d hut;)O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested byreptiles,resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and thewild-cat,andthe whirr of the rattlesnake;The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon⁠—singing through themoon-litnight,The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;A Tennessee corn-field⁠—the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn⁠—slender,flapping,brightgreen with tassels⁠—with beautiful ears, each well-sheath’d in its husk;An Arkansas prairie⁠—a sleeping lake, or still bayou;O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs⁠—I can stand them not⁠—I will depart;O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never wander more!