To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous
shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.
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 daybreak.
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.
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 pronouncing
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-streaking
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.)