Leaves of Grass: First and Death-Bed Editions

by Walt Whitman

  The cries and curses and roar .... the plaudits for well aimed

  shots,

  The ambulanza slowly passing and trailing its red drip,

  Workmen searching after damages and to make indispensable

  repairs,

  The fall of grenades through the rent roof .... the fan-shaped

  explosion,

  The whizz of limbs heads stone wood and iron high in the air.

  Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general .... he furiously

  waves with his hand,

  He gasps through the clot .... Mind not me .... mind .... the

  entrenchments.

  I tell not the fall of Alamo24 .... not one escaped to tell the fall of

  Alamo,

  The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

  Hear now the tale of a jetblack sunrise,

  Hear of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve

  young men.

  Retreating they had formed in a hollow square with their baggage

  for breastworks,

  Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s nine times

  their number was the price they took in advance,

  Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,

  They treated for an honorable capitulation, received writing

  and seal, gave up their arms, and marched back prisoners

  of war.

  They were the glory of the race of rangers,

  Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a supper or a courtship,

  Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud and

  affectionate,

  Bearded, sunburnt, dressed in the free costume of hunters,

  Not a single one over thirty years of age.

  The second Sunday morning they were brought out in squads

  and massacred .... it was beautiful early summer,

  The work commenced about five o‘clock and was over

  by eight.

  None obeyed the command to kneel,

  Some made a mad and helpless rush .... some stood stark and

  straight,

  A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart .... the living and

  dead lay together,

  The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt .... the new-comers

  saw them there;

  Some half-killed attempted to crawl away,

  These were dispatched with bayonets or battered with the blunts

  of muskets;

  A youth not seventeen years old seized his assassin till two more

  came to release him,

  The three were all torn, and covered with the boy’s blood.

  At eleven o‘clock began the burning of the bodies;

  And that is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve

  young men,

  And that was a jetblack sunrise.

  Did you read in the seabooks of the oldfashioned frigate-fight?25

  Did you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?

  Our foe was no skulk in his ship, I tell you,

  His was the English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and

  never was, and never will be;

  Along the lowered eve he came, horribly raking us.

  We closed with him .... the yards entangled .... the cannon

  touched,

  My captain lashed fast with his own hands.

  We had received some eighteen-pound shots under the water,

  On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire,

  killing all around and blowing up overhead.

  Ten o‘clock at night, and the full moon shining and the leaks on

  the gain, and five feet of water reported,

  The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after

  hold to give them a chance for themselves.

  The transit to and from the magazine was now stopped by the

  sentinels,

  They saw so many strange faces they did not know whom to

  trust.

  Our frigate was afire .... the other asked if we demanded quarters? if our colors were struck and the fighting done?

  I laughed content when I heard the voice of my little captain,

  We have not struck, he composedly cried, We have just begun

  our part of the fighting.

  Only three guns were in use,

  One was directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s

  mainmast,

  Two well-served with grape and canister silenced his musketry

  and cleared his decks.

  The tops alone seconded the fire of this little battery, especially

  the maintop,

  They all held out bravely during the whole of the action.

  Not a moment’s cease,

  The leaks gained fast on the pumps .... the fire eat toward the

  powder-magazine,

  One of the pumps was shot away .... it was generally thought we

  were sinking.

  Serene stood the little captain,

  He was not hurried .... his voice was neither high nor low,

  His eyes gave more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

  Toward twelve at night, there in the beams of the moon they surrendered to us.

  Stretched and still lay the midnight,

  Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,

  Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking .... preparations to pass to

  the one we had conquered,

  The captain on the quarter deck coldly giving his orders through

  a countenance white as a sheet,

  Near by the corpse of the child that served in the cabin,

  The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully

  curled whiskers,

  The flames spite of all that could be done flickering aloft and below,

  The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,

  Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves .... dabs of

  flesh upon the masts and spars,

  The cut of cordage and dangle of rigging .... the slight shock of

  the soothe of waves,

  Black and impassive guns, and litter of powder-parcels, and the

  strong scent,

  Delicate sniffs of the seabreeze .... smells of sedgy grass and fields

  by the shore .... death-messages given in charge to survivors,

  The hiss of the surgeon’s knife and the gnawing teeth of his saw,

  The wheeze, the cluck, the swash of falling blood .... the short

  wild scream, the long dull tapering groan,

  These so .... these irretrievable.

  O Christ! My fit is mastering me!

  What the rebel said gaily adjusting his throat to the rope-noose,

  What the savage at the stump, his eye-sockets empty, his mouth

  spirting whoops and defiance,

  What stills the traveler come to the vault at Mount Vernon,

  What sobers the Brooklyn boy as he looks down the shores of the

  Wallabout and remembers the prison ships,

  What burnt the gums of the redcoat at Saratoga when he

  surrendered his brigades,

  These become mine and me every one, and they are but little,

  I become as much more as I like.

  I become any presence or truth of humanity here,

  And see myself in prison shaped like another man,

  And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

  For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep

  watch,

  It is I let out in the morning and barred at night.

  Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to the jail, but I am handcuffed

  to him and walk by his side,

  I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat

  on my twitching lips.

  Not a youngster is
taken for larceny, but I go too and am tried and sentenced.

  Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at the last

  gasp,

  My face is ash-colored, my sinews gnarl .... away from me

  people retreat.

  Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them,

  I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg.

  I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,

  The whirling and whirling is elemental within me.

  Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!

  Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and

  dreams and gaping,

  I discover myself on a verge of the usual mistake.

  That I could forget the mockers and insults!

  That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the

  bludgeons and hammers!

  That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and

  bloody crowning!

  I remember .... I resume the overstaid fraction,

  The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it .... or

  to any graves,

  The corpses rise .... the gashes heal .... the fastenings roll

  away.

  I troop forth replenished with supreme power, one of an average

  unending procession,

  We walk the roads of Ohio and Massachusetts and Virginia and

  Wisconsin and New York and New Orleans and Texas and

  Montreal and San Francisco and Charleston and Savannah

  and Mexico,

  Inland and by the seacoast and boundary lines .... and we pass

  the boundary lines.

  Our swift ordinances are on their way over the whole earth,

  The blossoms we wear in our hats are the growth of two thousand

  years.

  ElevesrI salute you,

  I see the approach of your numberless gangs .... I see you

  understand yourselves and me,

  And know that they who have eyes are divine, and the blind and

  lame are equally divine,

  And that my steps drag behind yours yet go before them,

  And are aware how I am with you no more than I am with

  everybody.

  The friendly and flowing savage .... Who is he?

  Is he waiting for civilization or past it and mastering it?

  Is he some southwesterner raised outdoors? Is he Canadian?

  Is he from the Mississippi country? or from Iowa, Oregon or

  California? or from the mountain? or prairie life or bush-life?

  or from the sea?

  Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,

  They desire he should like them and touch them and speak to

  them and stay with them.

  Behaviour lawless as snow-flakes .... words simple as grass ....

  uncombed head and laughter and naivete;

  Slowstepping feet and the common features, and the common

  modes and emanations,

  They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,

  They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath .... they fly

  out of the glance of his eyes.

  Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask .... lie over,

  You light surfaces only .... I force the surfaces and the depths

  also.

  Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,

  Say old topknot! what do you want?

  Man or woman! I might tell how I like you, but cannot,

  And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,

  And might tell the pinings I have .... the pulse of my nights and

  days.

  Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity,

  What I give I give out of myself.

  You there, impotent, loose in the knees, open your scarfed chops

  till I blow grit within you,

  Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,

  I am not to be denied .... I compel .... I have stores plenty and

  to spare,

  And any thing I have I bestow.

  I do not ask who you are .... that is not important to me,

  You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

  To a drudge of the cottonfields or emptier of privies I lean .... on

  his right cheek I put the family kiss,

  And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

  On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes,

  This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.

  To any one dying .... thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,

  Turn the bedclothes toward the foot of the bed,

  Let the physician and the priest go home.

  I seize the descending man .... I raise him with resistless will.

  O despairer, here is my neck,

  By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon

  me.

  I dilate you with tremendous breath .... I buoy you up;

  Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force .... lovers

  of me, bafflers of graves:

  Sleep! I and they keep guard all night;

  Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,

  I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,

  And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you

  is so.

  I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,

  And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.

  I heard what was said of the universe,

  Heard it and heard of several thousand years;

  It is middling well as far as it goes .... but is that all?

  Magnifying and applying come I,26

  Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,

  The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirt of

  my own seminal wet,

  Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah and laying them

  away,

  Lithographing Kronos and Zeus his son, and Hercules his

  grandson,

  Buying drafts of Osiris and Isis and Belus and Brahma and

  Adonai,

  In my portfolio placing Manito loose, and Allah on a leaf, and the

  crucifix engraved,

  With Odin, and the hideous-faced Mexitli, and all idols and images,

  Honestly taking them all for what they are worth, and not a cent

  more,

  Admitting they were alive and did the work of their day,

  Admitting they bore mites as for unfledged birds who have now to

  rise and fly and sing for themselves,

  Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in

  myself .... bestowing them freely on each man and woman

  I see,

  Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,

  Putting higher claims for him there with his rolled-up sleeves,

  driving the mallet and chisel;

  Not objecting to special revelations .... considering a curl of

  smoke or a hair on the back of my hand as curious as any

  revelation;

  Those ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes more to

  me than the gods of the antique wars,

  Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,

  Their brawny limbs passing safe over charred laths .... their

  white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;

  By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding

  for every person born;

  Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels

  with shirts bagged out at their waists;

  The snag-toothed hostler with red h
air redeeming sins past and to

  come,

  Selling all he possesses and traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his

  brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery:

  What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about

  me, and not filling the square rod then;

  The bull and the bug never worshipped half enough,

  Dung and dirt more admirable than was dreamed,

  The supernatural of no account .... myself waiting my time to

  be one of the supremes,

  The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the

  best, and be as prodigious,

  Guessing when I am it will not tickle me much to receive puffs

  out of pulpit or print;

  By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator!

  Putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of the

  shadows!

  .... A call in the midst of the crowd,

  My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

  Come my children,

  Come my boys and girls, and my women and household and

  intimates,

  Now the performer launches his nerve .... he has passed his

  prelude on the reeds within.

  Easily written loosefingered chords! I feel the thrum of their climax and close.

  My head evolves on my neck,

  Music rolls, but not from the organ .... folks are around me, but

  they are no household of mine.

  Ever the hard and unsunk ground,

  Ever the eaters and drinkers .... ever the upward and downward

  sun .... ever the air and the ceaseless tides,

  Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing and wicked and real,

  Ever the old inexplicable query .... ever that thorned thumb—

  that breath of itches and thirsts,

  Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides

  and bring him forth;

  Ever love .... ever the sobbing liquid of life,

  Ever the bandage under the chin .... ever the trestles of death.