1.
From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you:
You are to die—Let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate,
I am exact and merciless, but I love you—There is no escape for you.
2.
Softly I lay my right hand upon you—you just feel it;
I do not argue—I bend my head close, and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by—I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbour,
I absolve you from all except yourself, spiritual, bodily—that is
eternal,—
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions!
Strong thoughts fill you, and confidence—you smile!
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines—you do not mind the weeping friends—I am
with you,
I exclude others from you—there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate—I congratulate you.
UNNAMED LANDS.
1.
Nations, ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten
thousand years before these States;
Garnered clusters of ages, that men and women like us grew up and travelled
their course, and passed on;
What vast-built cities—what orderly republics—what pastoral tribes and
nomads;
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others;
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions;
What sort of marriage—what costumes—what physiology and phrenology;
What of liberty and slavery among them—what they thought of death and the
soul;
Who were witty and wise—who beautiful and poetic—who brutish and
undeveloped;
Not a mark, not a record remains,—And yet all remains.
2.
O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more than we
are for nothing;
I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much as we
now belong to it, and as all will henceforth belong to it.