I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes, I feel the ocean and the forest—somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space; Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone—haply from endless store, God-sent, (For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense,) Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and cannot tell, Art thou not universal concrete’s distillation? Law’s, all Astronomy’s last refinement? Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?
Old Chants
An ancient song, reciting, ending, Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All, Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee, Accept for me, thou saidst, the elder ballads, And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.
(Of many debts incalculable, Haply our New World’s chieftest debt is to old poems.)
Ever so far back, preluding thee, America, Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia, The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian, The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene, The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas, Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur, The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen, The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds, Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds, The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays, Shakespeare, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson, As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences, The great shadowy groups gathering around, Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee, Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand and word, ascending, Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent with their music, Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them, Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.