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To Walt Whitman in America

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

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!

Sweet-smelling of pine-leaves and grasses,

And blown as a tree through and through

With the winds of the keen mountain-passes,

And tender as sun-smitten dew;

Sharp-tongued as the winter that shakes

The wastes of your limitless lakes,

Wide-eyed as the sea-line's blue.

O strong-winged soul with prophetic

Lips hot with the bloodheats of song,

With tremor of heartstrings magnetic,

With thoughts as thunders in throng,

With consonant ardours of chords

That pierce men's souls as with swords

And hale them hearing along,

Make us too music, to be with us

As a word from a world's heart warm,

To sail the dark as a sea with us,

Full-sailed, outsinging the storm,

A song to put fire in our ears

Whose burning shall burn up tears,

Whose sign bid battle reform;

A note in the ranks of a clarion,

A word in the wind of cheer,

To consume as with lightning the carrion

That makes time foul for us here;

In the air that our dead things infest

A blast of the breath of the west,

Till east way as west way is clear.

Out of the sun beyond sunset,

From the evening whence morning shall be,

With the rollers in measureless onset,

With the van of the storming sea,

With the world-wide wind, with the breath

That breaks ships driven upon death,

With the passion of all things free,

With the sea-steeds footless and frantic,

White myriads for death to bestride

In the charge of the ruining Atlantic

Where deaths by regiments ride,

With clouds and clamours of waters,

With a long note shriller than slaughter's

On the furrowless fields world-wide,

With terror, with ardour and wonder,

With the soul of the season that wakes

When the weight of a whole year's thunder

In the tidestream of autumn breaks,

Let the flight of the wide-winged word

Come over, come in and be heard,

Take form and fire for our sakes.

For a continent bloodless with travail

Here toils and brawls as it can,

And the web of it who shall unravel

Of all that peer on the plan;

Would fain grow men, but they grow not,

And fain be free, but they know not

One name for freedom and man?

One name, not twain for division;

One thing, not twain, from the birth;

Spirit and substance and vision,

Worth more than worship is worth;

Unbeheld, unadored, undivined,

The cause, the centre, the mind,

The secret and sense of the earth.

Here as a weakling in irons,

Here as a weanling in bands,

As a prey that the stake-net environs,

Our life that we looked for stands;

And the man-child naked and dear,

Democracy, turns on us here

Eyes trembling with tremulous hands

It sees not what season shall bring to it

Sweet fruit of its bitter desire;

Few voices it hears yet sing to it,

Few pulses of hearts reaspire;

Foresees not time, nor forehears

The noises of imminent years,

Earthquake, and thunder, and fire:

When crowned and weaponed and curbless

It shall walk without helm or shield

The bare burnt furrows and herbless

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 labours if slowlier,

Than the metres of star or of sun;

Slowlier than life into breath,

Surelier than time into death,

It moves till its labour 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,

A soul disembodied, it rise

From the body transfigured of time.

Till it rise and remain and take station

With the stars of the worlds that rejoice;

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.