No More Learning

Must not Nature be persuaded many times?
No dainty _dolce affettuoso_ I;
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe;
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.


17.

On my way a moment I pause;
Here for you! and here for America!
Still the Present I raise aloft--still the Future of the States I harbinge,
glad and sublime;
And for the Past, I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

The red aborigines!
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and
animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names;
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta,
Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla;
Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and
the land with names.


18.

O expanding and swift! O henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;
A world primal again--vistas of glory, incessant and branching;
A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far, with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

These my voice announcing--I will sleep no more, but arise;
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,
stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.


19.

See!
steamers steaming through my poems!
See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;
See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the
maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;
See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how
they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;
See pastures and forests in my poems--See animals, wild and tame--See,
beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short
curly grass;
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with
iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce;
See the many-cylindered steam printing-press--See the electric telegraph,
stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan;
See, through Atlantica's depths, pulses American, Europe reaching--pulses
of Europe, duly returned;
See the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the
steam-whistle;
See ploughmen, ploughing farms--See miners, digging mines--See the
numberless factories;
See mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools--See, from among them,
superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working
dresses;
See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me, well-beloved,
close-held by day and night;
Hear the loud echoes of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.


20.

O Camerado close!
O you and me at last--and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph--and you shall also;
O hand in hand--O wholesome pleasure--O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste, firm holding--to haste, haste on, with me.

[Footnote 1: Paumanok is the native name of Long Island, State of New York.
It presents a fish-like shape on the map. ]

[Footnote 2: Mannahatta, or Manhattan, is (as many readers will know) New
York. ]

[Footnote 3: 1856. ]

[Footnote 4: The poet here contemplates himself as yet living spiritually
and in his poems after the death of the body, still a friend and brother to
all present and future American lands and persons.