Celia has challenged me....

Be my reply,

Challenge to poets who, with tinkling tricks,

Meet life and pass it by.

“Beauty,” they ask, “in politics?”

“If you put it there,” say I.

Wide the new world had opened its bright gates.

And a woman who had heard of the new world

All her life long and had saved her pence

By hard frugality, to be her competence

In the free home, came eagerly in nineteen seven

Into These States,

With her little earnings furled

In a large handkerchief—but with a heart

Too rich to be contained, for she had done her part:

She had comeWith faith to Heaven.

But there was a panic that year,

No work, no wages in These States.

And a great fear

Seized on the immigrant. And so she took her pence

All of them, furled

Safe in her handkerchief, to a government cashier—

A clerk in the post-office. (And he relates

Her errand as a joke, yet tenderly

For I watched him telling me.)

... Not knowing English, being dumb,

She had brought with her a thin-faced lad

To interpret. And he made it clear,

While she unfurled

Her handkerchief and poured the heap of coins out of her hand,

That ‘she was giving all she had—

To be used no matter how, you understand’ ...

Lest harm should come to the new world.

O doubters of democracy,

Undo your mean contemptuous art!—More than in all that poetry has said,

More than in mound or marble, in the living live the dead.

The past has done its reproductive part.

Hear now the cry of beauty’s present needs,

Of comrades levelling a thousand creeds,

Finding futility

In conflict, selfishness, hardness of heart!

For love has many poets who can see

Ascending in the sky

Above the shadowy passes

The everlasting hills: humanity.

O doubters of the time to be,

What is this might, this mystery,

Moving and singing through democracy,

This music of the masses

And of you and me—

But purging and dynamic poetry!—

What is this eagerness from sea to sea

But young divinity!

I have seen doubters, with a puny joy,

Accept amusement for their little whileAnd feed upon some nourishing employ

But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile—

Protesting that one man can no more move the mass

For good or ill

Than could the ancients kindle the sun

By tying torches to a wheel and rolling it downhill.

But not the wet circumference of the seas

Can quench the living light in even these,

These who forget,

Eating the fruits of earth,

That nothing ever has been done

To spur the spirit of mankind,

Which has not come to pass

Forth from the heart and mind

Of some one man, through other men birth after birth,

In thoughts that dare

And in deeds that share

And in a will resolved to find

A finer breath

Born in the deep maternity of death.... If these be ecstasies of youth,

Yet they are news of which all time has need.

If they be lies, tell them yourselves and heed

How poets’ twice-told lies become the truth!

There was a poet Celia loved who, hearing all around

The multitudinous tread

Of common majesty,

(A hearty immigrant was he!)

Made of the gathering insurgent sound

Another continent of poetry?

His name is writ in his blood, mine and yours.

... “And when he celebrates

These States,”

She said, “how can Americans worth their salt

But listen to the wavesong on their shores,

The waves and Walt,

And hear the windsong over rock and wood,

The winds and Walt,

And let the mansong enter at their gates

And know that it is good!”

Walt Whitman, by his perfect friendliness

Has let me guess

That into Celia, into me,

He and unnumbered dead have come

To be our intimates,

To make of us their home

Commingling earth and heaven....

That by our true and mutual deeds

We shall at last be shriven

Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds

And petty separate fates—

That I in every man and he in me,

Together making God, are gradually creating whole

The single soul.

Somebody called Walt Whitman—

Dead!

He is alive instead,

Alive as I am. When I lift my head,

His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks,

My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks

Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand grow oldAnd take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth....

It is my joy to tell and to be told

That he, in all the world and me,

Cannot be dead,

That I, in all the world and him, youth after youth

Shall lift my head.