Leaves of Grass (1891-92)
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| O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening perfumed South! my South! |
| O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O
all dear to me! |
| O dear to me my birth-things—all moving things and the trees
where I was born—the grains, plants, rivers, |
| Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,
over flats of silvery sands or through swamps, |
| Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the
Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine, |
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| O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt
their banks again, |
| Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the Okee-
chobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings or dense forests, |
| I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the blos-
soming titi; |
| Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast
up the Carolinas, |
| I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,
the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto, |
| I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an
inlet, and dart my vision inland; |
| O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! |
| The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white
flowers, |
| The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods
charged with mistletoe and trailing moss, |
| The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here
in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;) |
| O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable
swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake, |
| The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,
singing through the moon-lit night, |
| The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; |
| A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav'd corn, slender,
flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful ears each well-sheath'd in its husk; |
| O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I
will depart; |
| O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian! |
| O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and
never wander more. |