O you dear women's and men's
phantoms!
Whitman
9.
Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping,
Now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for--I awake;
And already a thousand singers--a thousand songs, clearer, louder, and more
sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes, have started to life within me,
Never to die.
O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself--projecting me;
O solitary me, listening--never more shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more, the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in
the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there aroused--the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
O give me the clue! (it lurks in the night here somewhere;)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
O a word! O what is my destination? I fear it is henceforth chaos;--
O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes and all shapes, spring as
from graves around me!
O phantoms! you cover all the land, and all the sea!
O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown upon me;
O vapour, a look, a word! O well-beloved!
O you dear women's and men's phantoms!
A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up--what is it? --I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?
10.
Whereto answering, the Sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whispered me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisped to me the low and delicious word DEATH;
And again Death--ever Death, Death, Death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my aroused child's heart,
But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears, and laving me softly all over,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.
Which I do not forget,
But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's grey beach,
With the thousand responsive songs, at random,
My own songs, awaked from that hour;
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song, and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
The Sea whispered me.
_CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY. _
1.
Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to
face.
2.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are
to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home,
are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me,
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
