For the lands and for these passionate days and for myself,Now I awhile retire to thee O soil of autumn fields,
Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee,
Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,
Turning a verse for thee.
O earth that hast no voice, confide to me a voice,
O harvest of my lands — O boundless summer growths,
O lavish brown parturient earth — O infinite teeming womb,
A song to narrate thee.
2
Ever upon this stage,
Is acted God’s calm annual drama,
Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,
Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,
The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves,
The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,
The liliput countless armies of the grass,
The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages,
The scenery of the snows, the winds’ free orchestra,
The stretching light-hung roof of clouds, the clear cerulean and the
silvery fringes,
The high-dilating stars, the placid beckoning stars,
The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows,
The shows of all the varied lands and all the growths and products.
3
Fecund America — today,
Thou art all over set in births and joys!
Thou groan’st with riches, thy wealth clothes thee as a swathing-garment,
Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions,
A myriad-twining life like interlacing vines binds all thy vast demesne,
As some huge ship freighted to water’s edge thou ridest into port,
As rain falls from the heaven and vapors rise from earth, so have
the precious values fallen upon thee and risen out of thee;
Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle!
Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty,
Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,
Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle and lookest out upon
thy world, and lookest East and lookest West,
Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles, a million
farms, and missest nothing,
Thou all-acceptress — thou hospitable, (thou only art hospitable as
God is hospitable.)
4
When late I sang sad was my voice,
Sad were the shows around me with deafening noises of hatred and
smoke of war;
In the midst of the conflict, the heroes, I stood,
Or pass’d with slow step through the wounded and dying.
But now I sing not war,
Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps,
Nor the regiments hastily coming up deploying in line of battle;
No more the sad, unnatural shows of war.
Ask’d room those flush’d immortal ranks, the first forth-stepping armies?
Ask room alas the ghastly ranks, the armies dread that follow’d.
(Pass, pass, ye proud brigades, with your tramping sinewy legs,
With your shoulders young and strong, with your knapsacks and your muskets;
How elate I stood and watch’d you, where starting off you march’d.
Pass — then rattle drums again,
For an army heaves in sight, O another gathering army,
Swarming, trailing on the rear, O you dread accruing army,
O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea, with your fever,
O my land’s maim’d darlings, with the plenteous bloody bandage and
the crutch,
Lo, your pallid army follows.)
5
But on these days of brightness,
On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes the
high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and barns,
Should the dead intrude?
Ah the dead to me mar not, they fit well in Nature,
They fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass,
And along the edge of the sky in the horizon’s far margin.
Nor do I forget you Departed,
Nor in winter or summer my lost ones,
But most in the open air as now when my soul is rapt and at peace,
like pleasing phantoms,
Your memories rising glide silently by me.
6
I saw the day the return of the heroes,
(Yet the heroes never surpass’d shall never return,
Them that day I saw not.)
I saw the interminable corps, I saw the processions of armies,
I saw them approaching, defiling by with divisions,
Streaming northward, their work done, camping awhile in clusters of
mighty camps.
No holiday soldiers — youthful, yet veterans,
Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and workshop,
