English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. |
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| 817. Ethiopia Saluting the Colors |
| | | Walt Whitman (1819–1892) |
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| WHO are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human, | |
| With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet? | |
| Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet? | |
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| (’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines, | |
| Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com’st to me, | 5 |
| As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.) | |
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| Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d, | |
| A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, | |
| Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought. | |
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| No further does she say, but lingering all the day, | 10 |
| Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye, | |
| And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by. | |
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| What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? | |
| Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? | |
| Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen? | 15 |
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