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Leaves of Grass (1891-92)
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SONG OF THE UNIVERSAL.
1
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, |
In this broad earth of ours, |
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, |
Enclosed and safe within its central heart, |
Nestles the seed perfection. |
By every life a share or more or less, |
None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the seed is
waiting.
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2
Lo! keen-eyed towering science, |
As from tall peaks the modern overlooking, |
Successive absolute fiats issuing. |
Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science, |
For it has history gather'd like husks around the globe, |
For it the entire star-myriads roll through the sky. |
In spiral routes by long detours, |
(As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,) |
For it the partial to the permanent flowing, |
For it the real to the ideal tends. |
For it the mystic evolution, |
Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified. |
Forth from their masks, no matter what, |
From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears, |
Health to emerge and joy, joy universal. |
Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow, |
Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men and
states,
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Electric, antiseptic yet, cleaving, suffusing all, |
Only the good is universal. |
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3
Over the mountain-growths disease and sorrow, |
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering, |
High in the purer, happier air. |
From imperfection's murkiest cloud, |
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, |
One flash of heaven's glory. |
To fashion's, custom's discord, |
To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies, |
Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard, |
From some far shore the final chorus sounding. |
O the blest eyes, the happy hearts, |
That see, that know the guiding thread so fine, |
Along the mighty labyrinth. |
4
For the scheme's culmination, its thought and its reality, |
For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived. |
Thou too surroundest all, |
Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad
and new,
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The measur'd faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past, |
Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own, |
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all, |
All, all for immortality, |
Love like the light silently wrapping all, |
Nature's amelioration blessing all, |
The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain, |
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening. |
Give me O God to sing that thought, |
Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith, |
In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us, |
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space, |
Health, peace, salvation universal. |
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Nay but the lack of it the dream, |
And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, |
And all the world a dream. |
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