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Leaves of Grass (1860)
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12.
| 1 To oratists—to male or female, |
Vocalism, breath, measure, concentration, determina-
tion, and the divine power to use words.
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Are you full-lung'd and limber-lipp'd from long trial?
from vigorous practice? from physique?
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| Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they? |
Remembering inland America, the high plateaus,
stretching long?
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Remembering Kanada—Remembering what edges
the vast round edge of the Mexican Sea?
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| Come duly to the divine power to use words? |
3 For only at last, after many years—after chastity,
friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
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| After treading ground and breasting river and lake, |
After a loosened throat—after absorbing eras, tem-
peraments, races—after knowledge, freedom,
crimes,
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After complete faith—after clarifyings, elevations,
and removing obstructions,
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After these, and more, it is just possible there comes
to a man, a woman, the divine power to use
words.
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4 Then toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten
all—None refuse, all attend,
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Armies, ships, antiquities, the dead, libraries, paint-
ings, machines, cities, hate, despair, amity, pain,
theft, murder, aspiration, form in close ranks,
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They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently
through the mouth of that man, or that woman.
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| 5 O now I see arise orators fit for inland America, |
And I see it is as slow to become an orator as to
become a man,
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| And I see that power is folded in a great vocalism. |
6 Of a great vocalism, when you hear it, the merciless
light shall pour, and the storm rage around,
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| Every flash shall be a revelation, an insult, |
The glaring flame turned on depths, on heights, on
suns, on stars,
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| On the interior and exterior of man or woman, |
| On the laws of Nature—on passive materials, |
On what you called death—and what to you there-
fore was death,
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| As far as there can be death. |
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