Short Poems

THIS dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute--under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.

O LIVING always--always dying!
O the burials of me, past and present!
O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever!
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not--I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look
at, where I cast them!
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind!

HERE, take this gift!
I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or General,
One who should serve the good old cause, the great Idea, the progress
and freedom of the race;
Some brave confronter of despots--some daring rebel;
--But I see that what I was reserving, belongs to you just as much as
to any.

TO The States, or any one of them, or any city of The States,
Resist much, obey little;
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.

STILL, though the one I sing,
(One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to Nationality,
I leave in him Revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless,
indispensable fire!)

RACE of veterans! Race of victors!
Race of the soil, ready for conflict! race of the conquering march!
(No more credulity's race, abiding-temper'd race;)
Race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself;
Race of passion and the storm.

WORLD, take good notice, silver stars fading,
Milky hue ript, weft of white detaching,
Coals thirty-eight, baleful and burning,
Scarlet, significant, hands off warning,
Now and henceforth flaunt from these shores.

LOOK down, fair moon, and bathe this scene;
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen,
purple;
On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.

O TAN-FACED prairie-boy!
Before you came to camp, came many a welcome gift;
Praises and presents came, and nourishing food--till at last, among
the recruits,
You came, taciturn, with nothing to give--we but look'd on each
other,
When lo! more than all the gifts of the world, you gave me.

YEAR that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough--yet the air I breathed froze me;
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me;
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself;
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?