Drum-Taps
#AmericanWriters
As I sit in twilight late alone b… Musing on long-pass’d war-scenes—o… Of the vacant names, as unindented… The brief truce after battle, with… trenches
These I singing in spring collect… (For who but I should understand… And who but I should be the poet… Collecting I traverse the garden… Now along the pond-side, now wadin…
Ashes of soldiers South or North, As I muse retrospective murmuring… The war resumes, again to my sense… And again the advance of the armie… Noiseless as mists and vapors,
RESPONDEZ! Respondez! Let every one answer! let those wh… let none evade! (How much longer must we go on wit… and sneaking?
In a little house keep I pictures… It is round, it is only a few inch… Yet behold, it has room for all th… Here the tableaus of life, and her… Here, do you know this? this is ci…
Of the terrible doubt of appearanc… Of the uncertainty after all—that… That may-be reliance and hope are… That may-be identity beyond the gr… May-be the things I perceive—the…
I sit and look out upon all the so… oppression and shame; I hear secret convulsive sobs from… themselves, remorseful after deeds… I see, in low life, the mother mis…
The friendly and flowing savage, w… Is he waiting for civilization, or… Is he some Southwesterner rais’d… Is he from the Mississippi countr… The mountains? prairie-life, bush-…
O span of youth! ever-push’d elast… O manhood, balanced, florid and fu… My lovers suffocate me, Crowding my lips, thick in the por… Jostling me through streets and pu…
Beginning my studies the first ste… The mere fact consciousness, these… The least insect or animal, the se… The first step I say awed me and… I have hardly gone and hardly wish…
Whoever you are holding me now in… Without one thing all will be usel… I give you fair warning before you… I am not what you supposed, but fa… Who is he that would become my fol…
A song, a poem of itself—the word… Amid the wilds, the rocks, the sto… To me such misty, strange tableaux… Yonnondio— I see, far in the west or north, a…
As one by one withdraw the lofty a… From that great play on history’s… That lurid, partial act of war and… Fought out through wrath, fears, d… All past—and since, in countless g…
O Captain! my Captain, our fearfu… The ship has weather’d every rack,… The port is near, the bells I hea… While follow eyes the steady keel,… But O heart! heart! heart!
My spirit to yours dear brother, Do not mind because many sounding… I do not sound your name, but I u… I specify you with joy O my comra… who are with you, before and since…