object:1.whitman - Song Of The Redwood-Tree
author class:Walt Whitman
subject class:Poetry
book class:Whitman - Poems
class:chapter
A prophecy and indirectiona thought impalpable, to breathe, as air;
A chorus of dryads, fading, departingor hamadryads departing;
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
Farewell, my brethren,
Farewell, O earth and skyfarewell, ye neighboring waters;
My time has ended, my term has come.
Along the northern coast,
Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves,
In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country,
With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong
arms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axesthere in the Redwood
forest dense,
I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.
The choppers heard notthe camp shanties echoed not;
The quick-ear'd teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not,
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to
join the refrain;
But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high,
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbsout of its foot-thick bark,
That chant of the seasons and timechant, not of the past only, but
the future.
You untold life of me,
And all you venerable and innocent joys,
Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, 'mid rain, and many a summer
sun,
And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds;
O the great patient, rugged joys! my soul's strong joys, unreck'd by
man;
(For know I bear the soul befitting meI too have consciousness,
identity,
And all the rocks and mountains haveand all the earth
Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
Our time, our term has come.
Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers,
We who have grandly fill'd our time;
With Nature's calm content, and tacit, huge delight,
We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
And leave the field for them.
For them predicted long,
For a superber Racethey too to grandly fill their time,
For them we abdicatein them ourselves, ye forest kings!
In them these skies and airsthese mountain peaksShastaNevadas,
These huge, precipitous cliffsthis amplitudethese valleys grand
Yosemite,
To be in them absorb'd, assimilated.
Then to a loftier strain,
Still prouder, more ecstatic, rose the chant,
As if the heirs, the Deities of the West,
Joining, with master-tongue, bore part.
Not wan from Asia's fetishes,
Nor red from Europe's old dynastic slaughter-house,
(Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and
scaffolds every where,)
But come from Nature's long and harmless throespeacefully builded
thence,
These virgin landsLands of the Western Shore,
To the new Culminating Manto you, the Empire New,
You, promis'd long, we pledge, we dedicate.
You occult, deep volition's,
You average Spiritual Manhood, purpose of all, pois'd on yourself
giving, not taking law,
You Womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and
love, and aught that comes from life and love,
You unseen Moral Essence of all the vast materials of America, (age
upon age, working in Death the same as Life,)
You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould
the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space,
You hidden National Will, lying in your abysms, conceal'd, but ever
alert,
You past and present purposes, tenaciously pursued, may-be
unconscious of yourselves,
Unswerv'd by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface;
You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts,
statutes, literatures,
Here build your homes for goodestablish hereThese areas entire,
Lands of the Western Shore,
We pledge, we dedicate to you.
For man of youyour characteristic Race,
Here may be hardy, sweet, gigantic growhere tower, proportionate to
Nature,
Here climb the vast, pure spaces, unconfined, uncheck'd by wall or
roof,
Here laugh with storm or sunhere joyhere patiently inure,
Here heed himself, unfold himself (not others' formulas heed)here
fill his time,
To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last,
To disappear, to serve.
Thus, on the northern coast,
In the echo of teamsters' calls, and the clinking chains, and the
music of choppers' axes,
The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the
groan,
Such words combined from the Redwood-treeas of wood-spirits' voices
ecstatic, ancient and rustling,
The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing,
All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving,
From the Cascade range to the Wasatchor Idaho far, or Utah,
To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding,
The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanitythe
settlements, features all,
In the Mendocino woods I caught.
The flashing and golden pageant of California!
The sudden and gorgeous dramathe sunny and ample lands;
The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south;
Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier airvalleys and mountain
cliffs;
The fields of Nature long prepared and fallowthe silent, cyclic
chemistry;
The slow and steady ages ploddingthe unoccupied surface ripening
the rich ores forming beneath;
At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,
A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where;
Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the
whole world,
To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises
of the Pacific;
Populous citiesthe latest inventionsthe steamers on the rivers
the railroadswith many a thrifty farm, with machinery,
And wool, and wheat, and the grapeand diggings of yellow gold.
But more in you than these, Lands of the Western Shore!
(These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,)
I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years,
till now deferr'd,
Promis'd, to be fulfill'd, our common kind, the Race.
The New Society at last, proportionate to Nature,
In Man of you, more than your mountain peaks, or stalwart trees
imperial,
In Woman more, far more, than all your gold, or vines, or even vital
air.
Fresh come, to a New World indeed, yet long prepared,
I see the Genius of the Modern, child of the Real and Ideal,
Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the
past so grand,
To build a grander future.
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