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Leaves of Grass (1881-82)
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UNNAMED LANDS.
NATIONS ten thousand years before these States, and many times
ten thousand years before these States,
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Garner'd clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and
travel'd their course and pass'd on,
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What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes
and nomads,
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What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others, |
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions, |
What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and
phrenology,
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What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of
death and the soul,
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Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish
and undevelop'd,
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Not a mark, not a record remains—and yet all remains. |
O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any
more than we are for nothing,
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I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as
much as we now belong to it.
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Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand, |
Some with oval countenances learn'd and calm, |
Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects, |
Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen, |
Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,
laboring, reaping, filling barns,
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Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.
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Are those billions of men really gone? |
Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone? |
Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us? |
Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves? |
I believe of all those men and women that fill'd the unnamed
lands, every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible
to us,
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In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out
of what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn'd, in life.
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I believe that was not the end of those nations or any person of
them, any more than this shall be the end of my nation, or
of me;
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Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products,
games, wars, manners, crimes, prisons, slaves, heroes, poets,
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I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen world,
counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world,
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I suspect I shall meet them there, |
I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed
lands.
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