Celia has challenged me....
Be my reply,
Challenge to poets who, with tinkling tricks,
Meet life and pass it by.
“Beauty,” they ask, “in politics?”
“If you put it there,” say I.
Wide the new world had opened its bright gates.
And a woman who had heard of the new world
All her life long and had saved her pence
By hard frugality, to be her competence
In the free home, came eagerly in nineteen seven
Into These States,
With her little earnings furled
In a large handkerchief—but with a heart
Too rich to be contained, for she had done her part:
She had come
With faith to Heaven.
But there was a panic that year,
No work, no wages in These States.
And a great fear
Seized on the immigrant. And so she took her pence
All of them, furled
Safe in her handkerchief, to a government cashier—
A clerk in the post-office. (And he relates
Her errand as a joke, yet tenderly
For I watched him telling me.)
... Not knowing English, being dumb,
She had brought with her a thin-faced lad
To interpret. And he made it clear,
While she unfurled
Her handkerchief and poured the heap of coins out of her hand,
That ‘she was giving all she had—
To be used no matter how, you understand’ ...
Lest harm should come to the new world.
O doubters of democracy,
Undo your mean contemptuous art!—
More than in all that poetry has said,
More than in mound or marble, in the living live the dead.
The past has done its reproductive part.
Hear now the cry of beauty’s present needs,
Of comrades levelling a thousand creeds,
Finding futility
In conflict, selfishness, hardness of heart!
For love has many poets who can see
Ascending in the sky
Above the shadowy passes
The everlasting hills: humanity.
O doubters of the time to be,
What is this might, this mystery,
Moving and singing through democracy,
This music of the masses
And of you and me—
But purging and dynamic poetry!—
What is this eagerness from sea to sea
But young divinity!
I have seen doubters, with a puny joy,
Accept amusement for their little while
And feed upon some nourishing employ
But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile—
Protesting that one man can no more move the mass
For good or ill
Than could the ancients kindle the sun
By tying torches to a wheel and rolling it downhill.
But not the wet circumference of the seas
Can quench the living light in even these,
These who forget,
Eating the fruits of earth,
That nothing ever has been done
To spur the spirit of mankind,
Which has not come to pass
Forth from the heart and mind
Of some one man, through other men birth after birth,
In thoughts that dare
And in deeds that share
And in a will resolved to find
A finer breath
Born in the deep maternity of death.
... If these be ecstasies of youth,
Yet they are news of which all time has need.
If they be lies, tell them yourselves and heed
How poets’ twice-told lies become the truth!
There was a poet Celia loved who, hearing all around
The multitudinous tread
Of common majesty,
(A hearty immigrant was he!)
Made of the gathering insurgent sound
Another continent of poetry?
His name is writ in his blood, mine and yours.
... “And when he celebrates
These States,”
She said, “how can Americans worth their salt
But listen to the wavesong on their shores,
The waves and Walt,
And hear the windsong over rock and wood,
The winds and Walt,
And let the mansong enter at their gates
And know that it is good!”
Walt Whitman, by his perfect friendliness
Has let me guess
That into Celia, into me,
He and unnumbered dead have come
To be our intimates,
To make of us their home
Commingling earth and heaven....
That by our true and mutual deeds
We shall at last be shriven
Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds
And petty separate fates—
That I in every man and he in me,
Together making God, are gradually creating whole
The single soul.
Somebody called Walt Whitman—
Dead!
He is alive instead,
Alive as I am. When I lift my head,
His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks,
My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks
Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand grow old
And take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth....
It is my joy to tell and to be told
That he, in all the world and me,
Cannot be dead,
That I, in all the world and him, youth after youth
Shall lift my head.