Poem #2

Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass. 1900.

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;
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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, reliev’d, recluse by myself, for my own ears only;
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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,
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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;

(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries;

I see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for.)