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PROUD music of the storm! | |
| Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! | |
| Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains! | |
| Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras! | |
| You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert, | 5 |
| Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations; | |
| You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses! | |
| You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient! | |
| You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts; | |
| You sounds from distant guns, with galloping cavalry! | 10 |
| Echoes of camps, with all the different bugle-calls! | |
| Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless, | |
| Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber—Why have you seiz’d me? | |
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2
Come forward, O my Soul, and let the rest retire; | |
| Listen—lose not—it is toward thee they tend; | 15 |
| Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber, | |
| For thee they sing and dance, O Soul. | |
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| A festival song! | |
| The duet of the bridegroom and the bride—a marriage-march, | |
| With lips of love, and hearts of lovers, fill’d to the brim with love; | 20 |
| The red-flush’d cheeks, and perfumes—the cortege swarming, full of friendly faces, young and old, | |
| To flutes’ clear notes, and sounding harps’ cantabile. | |
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3
Now loud approaching drums! | |
| Victoria! see’st thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying? the rout of the baffled? | |
| Hearest those shouts of a conquering army? | 25 |
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| (Ah, Soul, the sobs of women—the wounded groaning in agony, | |
| The hiss and crackle of flames—the blacken’d ruins—the embers of cities, | |
| The dirge and desolation of mankind.) | |
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4
Now airs antique and medieval fill me! | |
| I see and hear old harpers with their harps, at Welsh festivals: | 30 |
| I hear the minnesingers, singing their lays of love, | |
| I hear the minstrels, gleemen, troubadours, of the feudal ages. | |
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5
Now the great organ sounds, | |
| Tremulous—while underneath, (as the hid footholds of the earth, | |
| On which arising, rest, and leaping forth, depend, | 35 |
| All shapes of beauty, grace and strength—all hues we know, | |
| Green blades of grass, and warbling birds—children that gambol and play—the clouds of heaven above,) | |
| The strong base stands, and its pulsations intermits not, | |
| Bathing, supporting, merging all the rest—maternity of all the rest; | |
| And with it every instrument in multitudes, | 40 |
| The players playing—all the world’s musicians, | |
| The solemn hymns and masses, rousing adoration, | |
| All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals, | |
| The measureless sweet vocalists of ages, | |
| And for their solvent setting, Earth’s own diapason, | 45 |
| Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves; | |
| A new composite orchestra—binder of years and climes—ten-fold renewer, | |
| As of the far-back days the poets tell—the Paradiso, | |
| The straying thence, the separation long, but now the wandering done, | |
| The journey done, the Journeyman come home, | 50 |
| And Man and Art, with Nature fused again. | |
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6
Tutti! for Earth and Heaven! | |
| The Almighty Leader now for me, for once has signal’d with his wand. | |
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| The manly strophe of the husbands of the world, | |
| And all the wives responding. | 55 |
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| The tongues of violins! | |
| (I think, O tongues, ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself; | |
| This brooding, yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.) | |
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7
Ah, from a little child, | |
| Thou knowest, Soul, how to me all sounds became music; | 60 |
| My mother’s voice, in lullaby or hymn; | |
| (The voice—O tender voices—memory’s loving voices! | |
| Last miracle of all—O dearest mother’s, sister’s, voices;) | |
| The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav’d corn, | |
| The measur’d sea-surf, beating on the sand, | 65 |
| The twittering bird, the hawk’s sharp scream, | |
| The wild-fowl’s notes at night, as flying low, migrating north or south, | |
| The psalm in the country church, or mid the clustering trees, the open air camp-meeting, | |
| The fiddler in the tavern—the glee, the long-strung sailor-song, | |
| The lowing cattle, bleating sheep—the crowing cock at dawn. | 70 |
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8
All songs of current lands come sounding ’round me, | |
| The German airs of friendship, wine and love, | |
| Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances—English warbles, | |
| Chansons of France, Scotch tunes—and o’er the rest, | |
| Italia’s peerless compositions. | 75 |
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| Across the stage, with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion, | |
| Stalks Norma, brandishing the dagger in her hand. | |
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| I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’ unnatural gleam; | |
| Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevell’d. | |
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| I see where Ernani, walking the bridal garden, | 80 |
| Amid the scent of night-roses, radiant, holding his bride by the hand, | |
| Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn. | |
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| To crossing swords, and grey hairs bared to heaven, | |
| The clear, electric base and baritone of the world, | |
| The trombone duo—Libertad forever! | 85 |
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| From Spanish chestnut trees’ dense shade, | |
| By old and heavy convent walls, a wailing song, | |
| Song of lost love—the torch of youth and life quench’d in despair, | |
| Song of the dying swan—Fernando’s heart is breaking. | |
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| Awaking from her woes at last, retriev’d Amina sings; | 90 |
| Copious as stars, and glad as morning light, the torrents of her joy. | |
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| (The teeming lady comes! | |
| The lustrious orb—Venus contralto—the blooming mother, | |
| Sister of loftiest gods—Alboni’s self I hear.) | |
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9
I hear those odes, symphonies, operas; | 95 |
| I hear in the William Tell, the music of an arous’d and angry people; | |
| I hear Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, the Prophet, or Robert; | |
| Gounod’s Faust, or Mozart’s Don Juan. | |
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10
I hear the dance-music of all nations, | |
| The waltz, (some delicious measure, lapsing, bathing me in bliss;) | 100 |
| The bolero, to tinkling guitars and clattering castanets. | |
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| I see religious dances old and new, | |
| I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre, | |
| I see the Crusaders marching, bearing the cross on high, to the martial clang of cymbals; | |
| I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers’d with frantic shouts, as they spin around, turning always towards Mecca; | 105 |
| I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs; | |
| Again, at Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing, | |
| I hear them clapping their hands, as they bend their bodies, | |
| I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet. | |
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| I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding each other; | 110 |
| I see the Roman youth, to the shrill sound of flageolets, throwing and catching their weapons, | |
| As they fall on their knees, and rise again. | |
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| I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling; | |
| I see the worshippers within, (nor form, nor sermon, argument, nor word, | |
| But silent, strange, devout—rais’d, glowing heads—extatic faces.) | 115 |
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11
I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings, | |
| The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen; | |
| The sacred imperial hymns of China, | |
| To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone;) | |
| Or to Hindu flutes, and the fretting twang of the vina, | 120 |
| A band of bayaderes. | |
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12
Now Asia, Africa leave me—Europe, seizing, inflates me; | |
| To organs huge, and bands, I hear as from vast concourses of voices, | |
| Luther’s strong hymn, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott; | |
| Rossini’s Stabat Mater dolorosa; | 125 |
| Or, floating in some high cathedral dim, with gorgeous color’d windows, | |
| The passionate Agnus Dei, or Gloria in Excelsis. | |
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13
Composers! mighty maestros! | |
| And you, sweet singers of old lands—Soprani! Tenori! Bassi! | |
| To you a new bard, carolling free in the west, | 130 |
| Obeisant, sends his love. | |
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| (Such led to thee, O Soul! | |
| All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee, | |
| But now, it seems to me, sound leads o’er all the rest.) | |
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14
I hear the annual singing of the children in St. Paul’s Cathedral; | 135 |
| Or, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the symphonies, oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn; | |
| The Creation, in billows of godhood laves me. | |
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| Give me to hold all sounds, (I, madly struggling, cry,) | |
| Fill me with all the voices of the universe, | |
| Endow me with their throbbings—Nature’s also, | 140 |
| The tempests, waters, winds—operas and chants—marches and dances, | |
| Utter—pour in—for I would take them all. | |
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15
Then I woke softly, | |
| And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream, | |
| And questioning all those reminiscences—the tempest in its fury, | 145 |
| And all the songs of sopranos and tenors, | |
| And those rapt oriental dances, of religious fervor, | |
| And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs, | |
| And all the artless plaints of love, and grief and death, | |
| I said to my silent, curious Soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber, | 150 |
| Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long, | |
| Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day, | |
| Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real, | |
| Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream. | |
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| And I said, moreover, | 155 |
| Haply, what thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds, | |
| Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh scream, | |
| Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy, | |
| Nor German organ majestic—nor vast concourse of voices—nor layers of harmonies; | |
| Nor strophes of husbands and wives—nor sound of marching soldiers, | 160 |
| Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-calls of camps; | |
| But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee, | |
| Poems, bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten, | |
| Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write. | |