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Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
Read the poem in its entirety.
Happy Sunday all.
You know, I just LOVE Whitman now.
ReplyDeleteI feel badly about how much I loathed him in school, but he was embarrassing then. Now, I look back at the starchy American poetry antecedents and smirk; he just must have worn Ezra Pound out no end, with his ecstatic speech.