with husky‑haughty lips, O Sea!
|
With husky‑haughty lips, O sSea! |
| Where day and night I wend thy surf‑beat shore, |
| Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions, |
| Thy troops of white‑maned racers racing to the goal, |
| Thy ample smiling face, dash'd with the spark- |
| ling dimples of the sun, |
| Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos'd |
| hurricanes |
| Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness; |
| Great as thou art o'er all, ^art seem'st above the rest, thy many tears—a lack |
| from all eternity in thy content, |
(Naught but the greatest, struggles, sorrows, wrongs, ^and wrongs, repressions,
^wrongs, defeats, |
| could make thee greatest—no less could |
| make thee,) |
| Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek'st and |
| seek'st, yet never gain'st, |
| Some ^Surely some right withheld—some voice, ^in huge monotonous rage, of freedom‑lover |
| pent, —some huge monotonous rage, |
| Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing ^in those breakers, |
| By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath, |
| And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves, |
| And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter, |
| And undertones of distant lion roar, |
| (Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear—but now |
| rapport for once, |
| A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,) |
| The first and last confession of the globe, |
| Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms, |
| The tale of cosmic elemental passion |
| Thou tellest to a Kindred soul. |
|
Walt Whitman |
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[Leaf 1 verso]
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