November Boughs

Walt Whitman

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780486496337
• eBook ISBN: 9780486794891
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

"I loved this book. It's an inexpensive collection of Walt Whitman poems, letters, and essays that is well worth your time … this book is worth purchasing and perusing due to its historical value of ruminations on American life." — Old Musty Books
Compiled when the great poet was 70 years old, November Boughs offers verse and prose reminiscences of a singular American life. Walt Whitman's reflections begin with the essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," in which he discusses the genesis of his most famous and controversial book, Leaves of Grass. A selection of poetry titled "Sands at Seventy" is followed by a series of essays and recollections that include "Slang in America," "What Lurks Behind Shakespeare's Historical Plays," "The Old Bowery," and notes on the life of the Quaker abolitionist Elias Hicks, whose body — it was rumored — he and a youthful group of friends once attempted to exhume.
This affordable, high-quality edition of a rare book of poetry and prose provides a greater context for the interpretation of Whitman's other works. Essential reading for Whitman scholars, this volume is also of interest to historians of the Civil War, abolitionism, and nineteenth-century America.

SANDS AT SEVENTY

Mannahatta

My city’s fit and noble name resumed,

Choice aboriginal name, with marvellous beauty, meaning,

A rocky founded island—shores where ever gayly dash the coming, going, hurrying sea waves.

Paumanok

Sea-beauty! stretch’d and basking!

One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious commerce, steamers, sails,

And one the Atlantic’s wind caressing, fierce or gentle—mighty hulls dark-gliding in the distance.

Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water—healthy air and soil!

Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!

From Montauk Point

I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,

Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,)

The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance, The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps—that inbound urge and urge of waves,

Seeking the shores forever.

To Those Who’ve Fail’d

To those who’ve fail’d, in aspiration vast,

To unnam’d soldiers fallen in front on the lead,

To calm, devoted engineers—to over-ardent travelers—to pilots on their ships,

To many a lofty song and picture without recognition—I’d rear a laurel-cover’d monument,

High, high above the rest—To all cut off before their time,

Possess’d by some strange spirit of fire,

Quench’d by an early death.

A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine

A carol closing sixty-nine—a résumé—a repetition,

My lines in joy and hope continuing on the same,

Of ye, O God, Life, Nature, Freedom, Poetry;

Of you, my Land—your rivers, prairies, States—you, mottled Flag I love,

Your aggregate retain’d entire—Of north, south, east and west, your items all;

Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,

The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed—the strange inertia falling pall-like round me,

The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,

The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.

The Bravest Soldiers

Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who lived through the fight;

But the bravest press’d to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown.

A Font of Type

This latent mine—these unlaunch’d voices—passionate powers,

Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout,

(Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,)

These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death,

Or sooth’d to ease and sheeny sun and sleep,

Within the pallid slivers slumbering.

As I Sit Writing Here

As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,

Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,

Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,

May filter in my daily songs.

My Canary Bird

Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,

Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?

But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,

Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,

Is it not just as great, O soul?

Queries to My Seventieth Year

Approaching, nearing, curious,

Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?

Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?

Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?

Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,

Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching?

The Wallabout Martyrs

[In Brooklyn, in an old vault, mark’d by no special recognition, lie huddled at this moment the undoubtedly authentic remains of the stanchest and earliest revolutionary patriots from the British prison ships and prisons of the times of 1776–83, in and around New York, and from all over Long Island; originally buried—many thousands of them—in trenches in the Wallabout sands.]

Greater than memory of Achilles or Ulysses,

More, more by far to thee than tomb of Alexander,

Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,

Once living men—once resolute courage, aspiration, strength,

The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.

The First Dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Memories

How sweet the silent backward tracings!

The wanderings as in dreams—the meditation of old times resumed—their loves, joys, persons, voyages.

To-day and Thee

The appointed winners in a long-stretch’d game;

The course of Time and nations—Egypt, India, Greece and Rome;

The past entire, with all its heroes, histories, arts, experiments,

Its store of songs, inventions, voyages, teachers, books,

Garner’d for now and thee—To think of it!

The heirdom all converged in thee!

After the Dazzle of Day

After the dazzle of day is gone,

Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;

After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads
• Sands at Seventy:
• Our Eminent Visitors, past, present and future
• The Bible as Poetry
• Father Taylor (and Oratory)
• The Spanish Element in Our Nationality
• What Lurks Behind Shakspere’s Historical Plays?
• A Thought on Shakspere
• Robert Burns as Poet and Person
• A Word About Tennyson
• Slang in America
• An Indian Bureau Reminiscence
• Some Diary Notes at Random
• Some War Memoranda
• Five Thousand Poems
• The Old Bowery
• Notes To Late English Books
• Abraham Lincoln
• New Orleans in 1848—Trip Up the Mississippi, &c.
• Small Memoranda
• Last of the War Cases
• Elias Hicks, Notes (such as they are,)