Leaves of Grass

Wandering at Morn

  Wandering at morn,
  Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
  Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!
  Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
      with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
  This common marvel I beheld—the parent thrush I watch’d feeding its young,
  The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
  Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

  There ponder’d, felt I,
  If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn’d,
  If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,
  Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
  Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?
  From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
  Destin’d to fill the world.

Italian Music in Dakota
  ["The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.”]

  Through the soft evening air enwinding all,
  Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
  In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes,
  Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
  (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,
  Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
  Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,
  Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
  Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish,
  And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)
  Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
  Music, Italian music in Dakota.

  While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,
  Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
  Acknowledging rapport however far remov’d,
  (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
  Listens well pleas’d.