You of the mighty Slavic tribes and
empires!
Whitman
8.
I see little and large sea-dots, some inhabited, some uninhabited;
I see two boats with nets, lying off the shore of Paumanok, quite still;
I see ten fishermen waiting--they discover now a thick school of
mossbonkers--they drop the joined sein-ends in the water,
The boats separate--they diverge and row off, each on its rounding course
to the beach, enclosing the mossbonkers;
The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop ashore,
Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats--others stand negligently
ankle-deep in the water, poised on strong legs;
The boats are partly drawn up--the water slaps against them;
On the sand, in heaps and winrows, well out from the water, lie the green-
backed spotted mossbonkers.
9.
I see the despondent red man in the west, lingering about the banks of
Moingo, and about Lake Pepin;
He has heard the quail and beheld the honey-bee, and sadly prepared to
depart.
I see the regions of snow and ice;
I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn;
I see the seal-seeker in his boat, poising his lance;
I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge, drawn by dogs;
I see the porpess-hunters--I see the whale-crews of the South Pacific and
the North Atlantic;
I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland--I mark the
long winters, and the isolation.
I see the cities of the earth, and make myself at random a part of them;
I am a real Parisian;
I am a habitant of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Constantinople;
I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne;
I am of London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick,
I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons, Brussels, Berne,
Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin, Florence;
I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw--or northward in Christiania or
Stockholm--or in Siberian Irkutsk--or in some street in Iceland;
I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them again.
10.
I see vapours exhaling from unexplored countries;
I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poisoned splint, the fetish,
and the obi.
I see African and Asiatic towns;
I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Monrovia;
I see the swarms of Pekin, Canton, Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, Yedo;
I see the Kruman in his hut, and the Dahoman and Ashantee-man in their
huts;
I see the Turk smoking opium in Aleppo;
I see the picturesque crowds at the fairs of Khiva, and those of Herat;
I see Teheran--I see Muscat and Medina, and the intervening sands--I see
the caravans toiling onward;
I see Egypt and the Egyptians--I see the pyramids and obelisks;
I look on chiselled histories, songs, philosophies, cut in slabs of
sandstone or on granite blocks;
I see at Memphis mummy-pits, containing mummies, embalmed, swathed in linen
cloth, lying there many centuries;
I look on the fallen Theban, the large-balled eyes, the side-drooping neck,
the hands folded across the breast.
I see the menials of the earth, labouring;
I see the prisoners in the prisons;
I see the defective human bodies of the earth;
I see the blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics;
I see the pirates, thieves, betrayers, murderers, slave-makers of the
earth;
I see the helpless infants, and the helpless old men and women.
I see male and female everywhere;
I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs;
I see the constructiveness of my race;
I see the results of the perseverance and industry of my race;
I see ranks, colours, barbarisms, civilisations--I go among them--I mix
indiscriminately,
And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.
11.
You, where you are!
You daughter or son of England!
You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ in Russia!
You dim-descended, black, divine-souled African, large, fine-headed,
nobly-formed, superbly destined, on equal terms with me!
You Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you Prussian!
You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese!
You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France!
You Belge! you liberty-lover of the Netherlands!
You sturdy Austrian! you Lombard! Hun!
