Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific
and vital,
Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.
30
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist
it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is
so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)
A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and
lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or
woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they
have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson
until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.
31
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey
work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect,
and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the
highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the
parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand
puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching
with depress’d head surpasses any statue, And
a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of
infidels.
I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss,
fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all
over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.
In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against
my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d
bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold
shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great
monsters lying low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and
logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north
to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure
of the cliff.
32
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are
so placid and
self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their
sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to
God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with
the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly
in their
possession.