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| O AMERICA, | |
| The sun sets in you! | |
| Are you the grave of our day? | |
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| Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race? | |
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| I would come, if I felt my hour had struck; | 5 |
| I would rather you came to me. | |
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| For that matter, | |
| Mahomet never went to any mountain | |
| Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul. | |
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| You have cajoled the souls of millions of us, | 10 |
| America— | |
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| Why won’t you cajole my soul? | |
| I wish you would. | |
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| I confess I am afraid of you. | |
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| The catastrophe of your exaggerate love, | 15 |
| You who never find yourself in love | |
| But only lose yourself further, decomposing. | |
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| You who never recover, out of the orgasm of loving, | |
| Your pristine isolate integrity, lost aeons ago, | |
| Your singleness within the universe. | 20 |
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| You who in loving break down, | |
| And break further and further down | |
| Your bounds of isolation, | |
| But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling, | |
| In a new proud singleness, America. | 25 |
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| Your more-than-European idealism, | |
| Like a be-aureoled, bleached skeleton hovering | |
| Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent. | |
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| And then your single resurrection | |
| Into machine-uprisen perfect man. | 30 |
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| Even the winged skeleton of your bleached ideal | |
| Is not so frightening as that clean smooth | |
| Automaton of your uprisen self, | |
| Machine American. | |
| |
| Do you wonder that I am afraid to come | 35 |
| And answer the first machine-cut question from the lips of your iron men?— | |
| Put the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers, | |
| And sit beside the steel-straight arms of your fair women, | |
| American? | |
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| I am so terrified, America, | 40 |
| Of the solid click of your human contact; | |
| And after this | |
| The winding-sheet of your selfless ideal love— | |
| Boundless love, | |
| Like a poison gas. | 45 |
| |
| Does no one realize that love should be intense, | |
| Not boundless? | |
| This boundless love is like the bad smell | |
| Of something gone wrong in the middle— | |
| All this philanthropy and benevolence on other people’s behalf | 50 |
| Just a bad smell. | |
| |
| Yet, America, | |
| Your elvishness, | |
| Your New England uncanniness, | |
| Your western brutal faery quality. | 55 |
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| My soul is half-cajoled, half-cajoled. | |
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| Something in you which carries me beyond, | |
| Yankee, Yankee— | |
| What we call human— | |
| Carries me where I want to he carried. | 60 |
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| What does it matter | |
| What we call human, and what we don’t call human? | |
| The rose would smell as sweet. | |
| And to be limited by a mere word is to be less than a hopping flea, which hops over such an obstruction at his first jump. | |
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| Your horrible, skeleton, aureoled ideal; | 65 |
| Your weird bright perfect productive mechanism— | |
| Two spectres. | |
| |
| But moreover, | |
| A dark unfathomed wistfulness, utterly un-Jewish; | |
| A grave stoic endurance, non-European; | 70 |
| An ultimate fearlessness, un-African; | |
| An irrational generosity, non-Oriental. | |
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| The strange unaccustomed geste of your elvish, New World nature | |
| Glimpsed now and then. | |
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| Nobody knows you; | 75 |
| You don’t know yourself. | |
| And I, who am half in love with you, | |
| What am I in love with— | |
| My own imaginings? | |
| Say it is not so. | 80 |
| |
| Say, through the branches, | |
| America, America, | |
| Of all your machines; | |
| Say, in the deep sockets of your idealistic skull— | |
| Dark aboriginal eyes, | 85 |
| Stoic, able to wait through ages, | |
| Glancing. | |
| |
| Say, in the sound of all your machines | |
| And white words, white-wash American— | |
| Deep pulsing of a strange heart, | 90 |
| New throb, like a stirring under the false dawn that precedes the real. | |
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| Nascent American, | |
| Elvish, lurking among the undergrowth | |
| Of many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke like pine-trees. | |
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| Dark faery, | 95 |
| Modern, unissued, instinctive America, | |
| Your nascent faery people | |
| Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket, | |
| Allure me till I am beside myself, | |
| A nympholept. | 100 |
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| “These States!” as Whitman said— | |
| Whatever he meant! | |
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