My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.

Be careful darkness! already what was it touch’d me? 
I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,
I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.

2 I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid, Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.

It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman’s,
I sit low in a straw-bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson’s
    stockings.

It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight,
I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin,
It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is
    blank here, for reasons.

(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)

     3
I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies
    of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with
    courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,
I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on
    the rocks.

What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves? 
Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime
    of his middle age?

Steady and long he struggles,
He is baffled, bang’d, bruis’d, he holds out while his strength
    holds out,
The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away,
    they roll him, swing him, turn him,
His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is
    continually bruis’d on rocks,
Swiftly and ought of sight is borne the brave corpse.

4
I turn but do not extricate myself,
Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet.

The beach is cut by the razory ice-wind, the wreck-guns sound,
The tempest lulls, the moon comes floundering through the drifts.

I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as
    she strikes, I hear the howls of dismay, they grow fainter and fainter.

I cannot aid with my wringing fingers,
I can but rush to the surf and let it drench me and freeze upon me.

I search with the crowd, not one of the company is wash’d to us alive,
In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in a barn.

     5
Now of the older war-days, the defeat at Brooklyn,
Washington stands inside the lines, he stands on the intrench’d
    hills amid a crowd of officers. 
His face is cold and damp, he cannot repress the weeping drops, He lifts the glass perpetually to his eyes, the color is blanch’d
    from his cheeks,
He sees the slaughter of the southern braves confided to him by
    their parents.