Leaves of Grass

Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

  Thick-sprinkled bunting! flag of stars!
  Long yet your road, fateful flag—long yet your road, and lined with
      bloody death,
  For the prize I see at issue at last is the world,
  All its ships and shores I see interwoven with your threads greedy banner;
  Dream’d again the flags of kings, highest borne to flaunt unrival’d?
  O hasten flag of man—O with sure and steady step, passing highest
      flags of kings,
  Walk supreme to the heavens mighty symbol—run up above them all,
  Flag of stars! thick-sprinkled bunting!

What Best I See in Thee
  [To U. S. G. return’d from his World’s Tour]

  What best I see in thee,
  Is not that where thou mov’st down history’s great highways,
  Ever undimm’d by time shoots warlike victory’s dazzle,
  Or that thou sat’st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace,
  Or thou the man whom feudal Europe feted, venerable Asia swarm’d upon,
  Who walk’d with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade;
  But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
  Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
  Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,
  Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
      world’s promenade,
  Were all so justified.

Spirit That Form’d This Scene
  [Written in Platte Canyon, Colorado]

  Spirit that form’d this scene,
  These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
  These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
  These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
  These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
  I know thee, savage spirit—we have communed together,
  Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
  Wast charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
  To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
  The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace—column
      and polish’d arch forgot?
  But thou that revelest here—spirit that form’d this scene,
  They have remember’d thee.