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1
GIVE me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling, | |
| Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard, | |
| Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows, | |
| Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape, | |
| Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content, | 5 |
| Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars, | |
| Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturb’d, | |
| Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should never tire, | |
| Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the world a rural domestic life, | |
| Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only, | 10 |
| Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities! | |
| These demanding to have them (tired with ceaseless excitement, and rack’d by the war-strife), | |
| These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart, | |
| While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city, | |
| Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets, | 15 |
| Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time refusing to give me up, | |
| Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul, you give me forever faces; | |
| (Oh I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries, | |
| I see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for). | |
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2
Keep your splendid silent sun, | 20 |
| Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods, | |
| Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards, | |
| Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum; | |
| Give me faces and streets—give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs! | |
| Give me interminable eyes—give me women—give me comrades and lovers by the thousand! | 25 |
| Let me see new ones every day—let me hold new ones by the hand every day! | |
| Give me such shows—give me the streets of Manhattan! | |
| Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and drums! | |
| (The soldiers in companies or regiments—some starting away, flush’d and reckless, | |
| Some, their time up, returning with thinn’d ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;) | 30 |
| Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships! | |
| O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied! | |
| The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me! | |
| The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torchlight procession! | |
| The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following; | 35 |
| People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants, | |
| Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now, | |
| The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets (even the sight of the wounded), | |
| Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! | |
| Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me. | 40 |
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