I that saw where ye trod

The dim paths of the night
Set the shadow called God

In your skies to give light;

But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in sight.

The tree many-rooted

That swells to the sky
With frondage red-fruited,
The life-tree am I ;

In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die.

But the Gods of your fashion
That take and that give,
In their pity and passion

That scourge and forgive,

They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off: they shall die and not live.

My own blood is what stanches
The wounds in my bark:

Stars caught in my branches

Make day of the dark,

And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.

Where dead ages hide under
The live roots of the tree,

In my darkness the thunder
Makes utterance of me;

In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of the sea.

That noise is of Time,

As his feathers are spread
And his feet set to climb

Through the boughs overhead,

And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread.

The storm-winds of ages

Blow through me and cease,
The war-wind that rages,

The spring-wind of peace,

Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of my blossoms in

crease.

All sounds of all changes,

All shadows and lights

On the world's mountain-ranges
And stream-riven heights,

Whose tongue is the wind's tongue and language of storm-clouds on earthshaking nights;

All forms of all faces,

All works of all hands
In unsearchable places

Of time-stricken lands,

All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands.

Though sore be my burden
And more than ye know,
And my growth have no guerdon
But only to grow,

Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or death worms below.

These too have their part in me,

As I too in these;

Such fire is at heart in me,

Such sap is this tree's,

Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of seas.

In the spring-colored hours
When my mind was as May's,
There brake forth of me flowers
By centuries of days,

Strong blossoms with perfume of manhood, shot out from my spirit as rays.

And the sound of them springing
And smell of their shoots
Were as warmth and sweet singing
And strength to my roots;

And the lives of my children made perfect with freedom of soul were my fruits.

I bid you but be;

I have need not of prayer;

I have need of you free

As your mouths of mine air; That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair.

More fair than strange fruit is
Of faith ye espouse;
In me only the root is

That blooms in your boughs; Behold now your God that ye made you, to feed him with faith of your vows.

In the darkening and whitening
Abysses ador'd,

With dayspring and lightning
For lamp and for sword,

God thunders in heaven, and his angels are red with the wrath of the Lord.

O my sons, O too dutiful

Toward Gods not of me,
Was not I enough beautiful?
Was it hard to be free?

For behold, I am with you, am in you and of you; look forth now and see.

Lo, wing'd with world's wonders,
With miracles shod,

With the fires of his thunders
For raiment and rod,

God trembles in heaven, and his angels are white with the terror of God.

For his twilight is come on him, His anguish is here; And his spirits gaze dumb on him, Grown gray from his fear; And his hour taketh hold on him stricken, the last of his infinite year.

Thought made him and breaks
him,

Truth slays and forgives;
But to you, as time takes him,

This new thing it gives,

Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.

For truth only is living,
Truth only is whole,
And the love of his giving

Man's polestar and pole;

Man, pulse of my centre, and fruit of my body, and seed of my soul.

One birth of my bosom ;

One beam of mine eye;
One topmost blossom

That scales the sky;

Man, equal and one with me, man that

is made of me, man that is I. 1871.

Singing? and is it for sorrow of that which was

That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be?

For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing."

-"Our lady of love by you is unbeholden

For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden

Treasure of hair, nor face nor form; But we

That love, we know her more fair than any thing."

--"Is she a queen, having great gifts to give?"

"Yea, these: that whoso hath seen her shall not live

Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain,

Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears;

And when she bids die he shall surely die.

And he shall leave all things under the sky,

And go forth naked under sun and rain,

And work and wait and watch out all his years."

-"Hath she on earth no place of habitation?"

"Age to age calling, nation answering nation,

Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to say;

For if she be not in the spirit of men, For if in the inward soul she hath no

"Is this worth life, is this, to win for wages?

Lo, the dead mouths of the awful graygrown ages,

The venerable, in the past that is their prison,

In the outer darkness, in the unopening grave,

Laugh, knowing how many as ye now say have said,

How many, and all are fallen, are fallen and dead:

Shall ye dead rise, and these dead have not risen?"

-"Not we but she, who is tender, and swift to save."

66

Enough of light is this for one life's span,

That all men born are mortal, but not man;

And we men bring death lives by night to sow,

That men may reap and eat and live by day.' 1871.

TO WALT WHITMAN IN AMERICA SEND but a song oversea for us,

Heart of their hearts who are free, Heart of their singer, to be for us More than our singing can be ; Ours, in the tempest at error, With no light but the twilight of terror; Send us a song oversea!

Of war's last flame-stricken field,
Till godlike, equal with time,
It stand in the sun sublime,

In the godhead of man revealed.

Round your people and over them
Light like raiment is drawn,
Close as a garment to cover them
Wrought not of mail nor of lawn :
Here, with hope hardly to wear,
Naked nations and bare

Swim, sink, strike out for the dawn.

Chains are here, and a prison,

Kings, and subjects, and shame : If the God upon you be arisen,

How should our songs be the same?
How in confusion of change,
How shall we sing, in a strange
Land songs praising his name?

God is buried and dead to us,
Even the spirit of earth,
Freedom: so have they said to us,
Some with mocking and mirth,
Some with heartbreak and tears:
And a God without eyes, without ears,
Who shall sing of him, dead in the
birth?

The earth-god Freedom, the lonely

Face lightening, the footprint unshod. Not as one man crucified only

Nor scourged with but one life's rod : The soul that is substance of nations, Reincarnate with fresh generations; The great god Man, which is God.

But in weariest of years and obscurest Doth it live not at heart of all things The one God and one spirit, a purest

Life, fed from unstanchable springs? Within love, within hatred it is, And its seed in the stripe as the kiss, And in slaves is the germ, and in kings.

Freedom we call it, for holier

Name of the soul's there is none; Surelier it labors, if slowlier,

Than the metres of star or of sun; Slowlier than life unto breath, Surelier than time unto death,

It moves till its labor be done.

Till the motion be done and the measure Circling through season and clime, Slumber and sorrow and pleasure, Vision of virtue and crime;

Till consummate with conquering eyes,

Till the voice of its heart's exultation
Be as theirs an invariable voice,
By no discord of evil estranged,
By no pause, by no breach in it changed,
By no clash in the chord of its choice.

It is one with the world's generations,
With the spirit, the star, and the sod:
With the kingless and king-stricken
nations,

With the cross, and the chain, and the rod ;

The most high, the most secret, most lonely,

The earth-soul Freedom, that only
Lives, and that only is God. 1871.

FROM MATER TRIUMPHALIS
[TO LIBERTY]

I am thine harp between thine hands,
O mother!

All my strong chords are strained with love of thee.

We grapple in love and wrestle, as each with other

Wrestle the wind and the unreluctant

sea.

I am no courtier of thee sober-suited,
Who loves a little for a little pay.
Me not thy winds and storms, nor
thrones disrooted,

Nor molten crowns, nor thine own sins, dismay.

Sinned hast thou sometime, therefore art thou sinless;

Stained hast thou been, who art there

fore without stain;

Even as man's soul is kin to thee, but kinless

Thou, in whose womb Time sows the all-various grain.

I do not bid thee spare me, O dreadful mother!

I pray thee that thou spare not, of thy grace.

How were it with me then, if ever another

Should come to stand before thee in this my place?