Walt Whitman Poetry

Poets to Come

Poets to come!
orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic,
continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words
for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry
back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,
turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

To the Garden the World

To the garden the world anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies,
meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep
having brought me again,
Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays
through them, for reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.

Tears

Tears! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears,
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand,
Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?
Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind–O belching and desperate!
O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and
regulated pace,
But away at night as you fly, none looking–O then the unloosen’d ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears!

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

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