PRIMEVAL my love for the woman I love,
O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the
thought of you!
Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,
...
SOMETIMES with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse
unreturn'd love;
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love--the pay is certain, one
...
A LEAF for hand in hand!
You natural persons old and young!
You on the Mississippi, and on all the branches and bayous of the
...
City of ships!
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
O the beautiful sharp-bow'd steam-ships and sail-ships!)
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BEHAVIOR--fresh, native, copious, each one for himself or herself,
Nature and the Soul expressed--America and freedom expressed--In it
the finest art,
In it pride, cleanliness, sympathy, to have their chance,
...
ON the beach, at night,
Stands a child, with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
...
AS at thy portals also death,
Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,
To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
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I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
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A LINE in long array, where they wind betwixt green islands;
They take a serpentine course--their arms flash in the sun--Hark to
the musical clank;
...
FULL of life, now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States,
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,
...