object:1.whitman - Longings For Home
author class:Walt Whitman
subject class:Poetry
book class:Whitman - Poems
class:chapter
Longings For Home
O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-thingsAll moving things, and the trees where I was
bornthe
grains,
plants, rivers;
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery
sands,
or
through swamps;
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee,
the
Coosa, and the Sabine;
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again;
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakesI float on the OkeechobeeI cross
the
hummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests;
I see the parrots in the woodsI see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi;
Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off GeorgiaI coast up the Carolinas,
I see where the live-oak is growingI see where the yellow-pine, the scented
bay-tree, the
lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;
I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision
inland;
O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
The cactus, guarded with thornsthe laurel-tree, with large white flowers;
The range afarthe richness and barrennessthe old woods charged with mistletoe
and
trailing moss,
The piney odor and the gloomthe awful natural stillness, (Here in these dense swamps
the
freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his conceal'd hut;)
O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by
reptiles,
resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the
wild-cat,
and
the whirr of the rattlesnake;
The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoonsinging through the
moon-lit
night,
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
A Tennessee corn-fieldthe tall, graceful, long-leav'd cornslender,
flapping,
bright
green with tasselswith beautiful ears, each well-sheath'd in its husk;
An Arkansas prairiea sleeping lake, or still bayou;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangsI can stand them notI will depart;
O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never wander more!
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