Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (red queen free ebook txt) 📖

inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,

I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,

They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

 

I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,

Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,

White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared

of their fire-caps,

The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

 

Distant and dead resuscitate,

They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.

 

I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment,

I am there again.

 

Again the long roll of the drummers,

Again the attacking cannon, mortars,

Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.

 

I take part, I see and hear the whole,

The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim’d shots,

The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,

Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,

The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,

The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.

 

Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves

with his hand,

He gasps through the clot Mind not me—mind—the entrenchments.

 

34

Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,

(I tell not the fall of Alamo,

Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,

The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)

‘Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve

young men.

 

Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for

breastworks,

Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemies, nine times their

number, was the price they took in advance,

Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,

They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and

seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war.

 

They were the glory of the race of rangers,

Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,

Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,

Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,

Not a single one over thirty years of age.

 

The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and

massacred, it was beautiful early summer,

The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.

 

None obey’d the command to kneel,

Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,

A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead

lay together,

The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,

Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away,

These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets,

A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more

came to release him,

The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood.

 

At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;

That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.

 

35

Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?

Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?

List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me.

 

Our foe was no sulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)

His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer,

and never was, and never will be;

Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us.

 

We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d,

My captain lash’d fast with his own hands.

 

We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water,

On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire,

killing all around and blowing up overhead.

 

Fighting at sundown, fighting at dark,

Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain,

and five feet of water reported,

The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold

to give them a chance for themselves.

 

The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,

They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.

 

Our frigate takes fire,

The other asks if we demand quarter?

If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

 

Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,

We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part

of the fighting.

 

Only three guns are in use,

One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s main-mast,

Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and

clear his decks.

 

The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially

the main-top,

They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.

 

Not a moment’s cease,

The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.

 

One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.

 

Serene stands the little captain,

He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,

His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

 

Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.

 

36

Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,

Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,

Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the

one we have conquer’d,

The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a

countenance white as a sheet,

Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,

The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully

curl’d whiskers,

The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,

The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,

Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh

upon the masts and spars,

Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,

Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,

A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,

Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by

the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,

The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,

Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long,

dull, tapering groan,

These so, these irretrievable.

 

37

You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!

In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!

Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,

See myself in prison shaped like another man,

And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

 

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,

It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.

 

Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him

and walk by his side,

(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat

on my twitching lips.)

 

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried

and sentenced.

 

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,

My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

 

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,

I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

 

38

Enough! enough! enough!

Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!

Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

 

That I could forget the mockers and insults!

That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the

bludgeons and hammers!

That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and

bloody crowning.

 

I remember now,

I resume the overstaid fraction,

The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,

Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

 

I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average

unending procession,

Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,

Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,

The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.

 

Eleves, I salute you! come forward!

Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.

 

39

The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?

Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?

 

Is he some Southwesterner rais’d out-doors? is he Kanadian?

Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?

The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?

 

Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,

They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.

 

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d

head, laughter, and naivete,

Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,

They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,

They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of

the glance of his eyes.

 

40

Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask—lie over!

You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.

 

Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,

Say, old top-knot, what do you want?

 

Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,

And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,

And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.

 

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,

When I give I give myself.

 

You there, impotent, loose in the knees,

Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you,

Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,

I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,

And any thing I have I bestow.

 

I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,

You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

 

To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,

On his right cheek I put the family kiss,

And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

 

On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.

(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)

 

To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.

Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,

Let the physician and the priest go home.

 

I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,

O despairer, here is my neck,

By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

 

I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,

Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,

Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.

 

Sleep—I and they keep guard all night,

Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,

I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,

And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.

 

41

I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,

And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.

 

I heard what was said of the universe,

Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;

It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all?

 

Magnifying and applying come