Exult O lands! victorious lands!
Not there your victory on those red shuddering fields,
But here and hence your victory.
Melt, melt away ye armies—disperse ye blue-clad
soldiers,
Resolve ye back again, give up for good your deadly
arms,
Other the arms the fields henceforth for you, or South
or North,
With saner wars, sweet wars, life-giving wars.
7
Loud O my throat, and clear O soul!
The season of thanks and the voice of full-yielding,
The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.
All till’d and untill’d fields expand
before me,
I see the true arenas of my race, or first or last,
Man’s innocent and strong arenas.
I see the heroes at other toils,
I see well-wielded in their hands the better weapons.
I see where the Mother of All,
With full-spanning eye gazes forth, dwells long,
And counts the varied gathering of the products.
Busy the far, the sunlit panorama,
Prairie, orchard, and yellow grain of the North,
Cotton and rice of the South and Louisianian cane,
Open unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy,
Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine,
And many a stately river flowing and many a jocund
brook,
And healthy uplands with herby-perfumed breezes,
And the good green grass, that delicate miracle the
ever-recurring grass.
8
Toil on heroes! harvest the products!
Not alone on those warlike fields the Mother of All,
With dilated form and lambent eyes watch’d you.
Toil on heroes! toil well! handle the weapons well!
The Mother of All, yet here as ever she watches you.
Well-pleased America thou beholdest,
Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters,
The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements;
Beholdest moving in every direction imbued as with
life the
revolving hay-rakes,
The steam-power reaping-machines and the horse-power
machines
The engines, thrashers of grain and cleaners of grain,
well
separating the straw, the
nimble work of the patent pitchfork,
Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin,
and the
rice-cleanser.
Beneath thy look O Maternal,
With these and else and with their own strong hands
the heroes harvest.
All gather and all harvest,
Yet but for thee O Powerful, not a scythe might swing
as now in security,
Not a maize-stalk dangle as now its silken tassels
in peace.
Under thee only they harvest, even but a wisp of hay
under thy great
face only,
Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every
barbed spear
under thee,
Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee,
each ear in its
light-green sheath,
Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil
barns,
Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat
of Michigan, to theirs;


