LEAVES OF GRASS.

PROTO-LEAF.

1. FREE, fresh, savage,

Fluent, luxuriant, self-content, fond of persons and

places,

Fond of fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Fond of the sea

lusty-begotten and various,
Boy of the Mannahatta, the city of ships, my city,
Or raised inland, or of the south savannas,

Or full-breath'd on Californian air, or Texan or
Cuban air,

Tallying, vocalizing all-resounding Niagara-
resounding Missouri,

Or rude in my home in Kanuck woods,

Or wandering and hunting, my drink water, my diet meat,

Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep

recess,

Far from the clank of crowds, an interval passing, rapt and happy,

Stars, vapor, snow, the hills, rocks, the Fifth Month flowers, my amaze, my love,

Aware of the buffalo, the peace-herds, the bull, strongbreasted and hairy,

Aware of the mocking-bird of the wilds at daybreak, Solitary, singing in the west, I strike up for a new world.

2 Victory, union, faith, identity, time, the Soul, yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.

1

3. This then is life,

Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

4. How curious! How real!

Underfoot the divine soil-Overhead the sun.

5. See, revolving,

The globe the ancestor-continents, away, grouped together,

The present and future continents, north and south, with the isthmus between.

6. See, vast, trackless spaces,

As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill,
Countless masses debouch upon them,

They are now covered with the foremost people, arts,
institutions known.

7. See projected, through time,

For me, an audience interminable.

8. With firm and regular step they wend-they never stop,

Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,
One generation playing its part and passing on,
And another generation playing its part and passing
on in its turn,

With faces turned sideways or backward toward me
to listen,

With eyes retrospective toward me.

9. Americanos! Masters!

Marches humanitarian! Foremost!
Century marches! Libertad! Masses!
For you a programme of chants.

10. Chants of the prairies,

Chants of the long-running Mississippi,

Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota,

Inland chants chants of Kanzas,

Chants away down to Mexico, and up north to
Oregon - Kanadian chants,

Chants of teeming and turbulent cities - chants of
mechanics,

Yankee chants-Pennsylvanian chants-chants of
Kentucky and Tennessee,
Chants of dim-lit mines

chants of mountain-tops,

Chants of sailors chants of the Eastern Sea and the Western Sea,

Chants of the Mannahatta, the place of my dearest love, the place surrounded by hurried and sparkling currents,

Health chants-joy chants-robust chants of young

men,

Chants inclusive-wide reverberating chants,
Chants of the Many In One. •

11. In the Year 80 of The States,

My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here,

From parents the same, and their parents' parents
the same,

I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

12. Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,

With accumulations, now coming forward in front, Arrived again, I harbor, for good or bad- I permit to speak,

Nature, without check, with original energy.

13. Take my leaves, America!

Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring;

Surround them, East and West! for they would surround you,

And you precedents! connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you.

14. I conned old times,

I sat studying at the feet of the great masters;
Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might
return and study me!

15. In the name of These States, shall I scorn the antique?

Why These are the children of the antique, to justify it.

16. Dead poets, philosophs, priests,

Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers, on other shores,

Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or
desolate,

I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted hither,

I have perused it - I own it is admirable,

I think nothing can ever be greater-Nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves;

I regard it all intently a long while,

Then take my place for good with my own day and race here.

17. Here lands female and male,

Here the heirship and heiress-ship of the world –
Here the flame of materials,

Here Spirituality, the translatress, the openly-avowed,
The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms,

The satisfier, after due long-waiting, now advancing,
Yes, here comes the mistress, the Soul.

18. The SOUL!

Forever and forever. Longer than soil is brown and solid-Longer than water ebbs and flows.

19. I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my Soul and of immortality.

20. I will make a song for These States, that no one under any circumstances be subjected

State may

to another State,

And I will make a song that there shall be comity

by day and by night between all The States, and between any two of them,