1
ELEMENTAL drifts! | |
| How I wish I could impress others as you have just been impressing me! | |
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| As I ebb’d with an ebb of the ocean of life, | |
| As I wended the shores I know, | |
| As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you, Paumanok, | 5 |
| Where they rustle up, hoarse and sibilant, | |
| Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, | |
| I, musing, late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, | |
| Alone, held by this eternal Self of me, out of the pride of which I utter my poems, | |
| Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, | 10 |
| In the rim, the sediment, that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. | |
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| Fascinated, my eyes, reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender winrows, | |
| Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, | |
| Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide: | |
| Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, | 15 |
| Paumanok, there and then, as I thought the old thought of likenesses, | |
| These you presented to me, you fish-shaped island, | |
| As I wended the shores I know, | |
| As I walk’d with that eternal Self of me, seeking types. | |
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2
As I wend to the shores I know not, | 20 |
| As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d, | |
| As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, | |
| As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, | |
| I, too, but signify, at the utmost, a little wash’d-up drift, | |
| A few sands and dead leaves to gather, | 25 |
| Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift. | |
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| O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth, | |
| Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, | |
| Aware now, that, amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, | |
| But that before all my insolent poems the real ME stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, | 30 |
| Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, | |
| With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, | |
| Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. | |
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| Now I perceive I have not understood anything—not a single object—and that no man ever can. | |
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| I perceive Nature, here in sight of the sea, is taking advantage of me, to dart upon me, and sting me, | 35 |
| Because I have dared to open my mouth, to sing at all. | |
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3
You oceans both! I close with you; | |
| We murmur alike reproachfully, rolling our sands and drift, knowing not why, | |
| These little shreds indeed, standing for you and me and all. | |
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| You friable shore, with trails of debris! | 40 |
| You fish-shaped island! I take what is underfoot; | |
| What is yours is mine, my father. | |
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| I too Paumanok, | |
| I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores; | |
| I too am but a trail of drift and debris, | 45 |
| I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island. | |
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| I throw myself upon your breast, my father, | |
| I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me, | |
| I hold you so firm, till you answer me something. | |
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| Kiss me, my father, | 50 |
| Touch me with your lips, as I touch those I love, | |
| Breathe to me, while I hold you close, the secret of the murmuring I envy. | |
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4
Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,) | |
| Cease not your moaning, you fierce old mother, | |
| Endlessly cry for your castaways—but fear not, deny not me, | 55 |
| Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet, as I touch you, or gather from you. | |
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| I mean tenderly by you and all, | |
| I gather for myself, and for this phantom, looking down where we lead, and following me and mine. | |
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| Me and mine! | |
| We, loose winrows, little corpses, | 60 |
| Froth, snowy white, and bubbles, | |
| (See! from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last! | |
| See—the prismatic colors, glistening and rolling!) | |
| Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, | |
| Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another, | 65 |
| From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell; | |
| Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil; | |
| Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown; | |
| A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random; | |
| Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature; | 70 |
| Just as much, whence we come, that blare of the cloud-trumpets; | |
| We, capricious, brought hither, we know not whence, spread out before you, | |
| You, up there, walking or sitting, | |
| Whoever you are—we too lie in drifts at your feet. | |
