Published Works

Books by Whitman

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [begin page 399] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE VOICE OF THE RAIN.

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,

Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,

Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed,
and yet the same,

I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,

And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;

And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own
origin, and make pure and beautify it;

(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wander-
ing,

Reck'd or unreck'd. duly with love returns.)

Distributed under a Creative Commons License. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price, editors.