Walt Whitman

LEAVES OF GRASS
(1891-92 issue)
complete book, e-book

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BOOK XIV

Song of the Redwood-Tree

1

 A California song,
 A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air,
 A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing,
 A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
 Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.
 
 Farewell my brethren,
 Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,
 My time has ended, my term has come.
 
 Along the northern coast,
 Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,
 In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,
 With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
 With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
 Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood
 forest dense,
 I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting.
 
 The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not,
 The quick-ear'd teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,
 As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to
 join the refrain,
 But in my soul I plainly heard.
 
 Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
 Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high,
 Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,
 That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but
 the future.
 
 You untold life of me,
 And all you venerable and innocent joys,
 Perennial hardy life of me with joys 'mid rain and many a summer sun,
 And the white snows and night and the wild winds;
 O the great patient rugged joys, my soul's strong joys unreck'd by man,
 (For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,
 And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,)
 Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
 Our time, our term has come.
 
 Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,
 We who have grandly fill'd our time,
 With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight,
 We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
 And leave the field for them.
 
 For them predicted long,
 For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time,
 For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings.'
 In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks, Shasta, Nevadas,
 These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys, far Yosemite,
 To be in them absorb'd, assimilated.
 
 Then to a loftier strain,
 Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant,
 As if the heirs, the (...)
(......)