} 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
    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 resume—­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 dally 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?