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Leaves of Grass (1881-82)
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AS CONSEQUENT, Etc.
AS consequent from store of summer rains, |
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing, |
Or many a herb-lined brook's reticulations, |
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea, |
Songs of continued years I sing. |
Life's ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend, |
With the old streams of death.) |
Some threading Ohio's farm-fields or the woods, |
Some down Colorado's cañons from sources of perpetual snow, |
Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas, |
Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa, |
Some to Atlantica's bays, and so to the great salt brine. |
In you whoe'er you are my book perusing, |
In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing, |
All, all toward the mystic ocean tending. |
Currents for starting a continent new, |
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid, |
Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves, |
(Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous'd and ominous too, |
Out of the depths the storm's abysmic waves, who knows whence? |
Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter'd sail.) |
Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring, |
A windrow-drift of weeds and shells. |
O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless, |
Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held, |
Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity's music faint and far, |
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim, strains for the soul of the
prairies,
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Whisper'd reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously
sounding,
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Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable, |
Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life, |
View Page 278
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(For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,) |
These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry, |
Wash'd on America's shores? |
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