Emotions and Feelings

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. 5

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers.

I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly, My truant lover has come, and it is dark.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

A batter’d, wreck’d old man, Thrown on this savage shore, far from home, Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months, Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken’d and nigh to death, I take my way along the island’s edge, Venting a heavy heart.

Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.