9 January 2012

{My Secret Garden}



No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year! 
Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas 
piano; 

But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, 
carrying a rifle on your shoulder,  With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands–with a knife in 
the belt at your side,  As I heard you shouting loud–your sonorous voice ringing across the 
continent; 

Your masculine voice, O year, as rising amid the great cities, 
Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you, as one of the workmen, the 
dwellers in Manhattan; 

Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and 
Indiana,  Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait, and descending the 
Alleghanies; 

Or down from the great lakes, or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along 
the Ohio river; 

Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at 
Chattanooga on the mountain top, 
Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs, clothed in blue, bearing 
weapons, robust year; 

Heard your determin’d voice, launch’d forth again and again; 
Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp’d cannon, 
I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year. 

                        -Walt Whitman.


                        

                                       








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