Walt Whitman

Here you will find the Long Poem American Feuillage of poet Walt Whitman

American Feuillage

AMERICA always!
 Always our own feuillage!
 Always Florida's green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of
 Louisiana! Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!
 Always California's golden hills and hollows--and the silver
 mountains of New Mexico! Always soft-breath'd Cuba!
 Always the vast slope drain'd by the Southern Sea--inseparable with
 the slopes drain'd by the Eastern and Western Seas;
 The area the eighty-third year of These States--the three and a half
 millions of square miles;
 The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main--
 the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
 The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of
 dwellings--Always these, and more, branching forth into
 numberless branches;
 Always the free range and diversity! always the continent of
 Democracy!
 Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers,
 Kanada, the snows; 10
 Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt
 stringing the huge oval lakes;
 Always the West, with strong native persons--the increasing density
 there--the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning
 invaders;
 All sights, South, North, East--all deeds, promiscuously done at all
 times,
 All characters, movements, growths--a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,
 Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering;
 On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
 wooding up;
 Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys
 of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke
 and Delaware;
 In their northerly wilds, beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks,
 the hills--or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink;
 In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the
 water, rocking silently;
 In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done--they
 rest standing--they are too tired; 20
 Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs
 play around;
 The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail'd--the farthest polar
 sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes;
 White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes;
 On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike
 midnight together;
 In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding--the howl of the
 wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the
 elk;
 In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake--in summer
 visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming;
 In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black
 buzzard floating slowly, high beyond the tree tops,
 Below, the red cedar, festoon'd with tylandria--the pines and
 cypresses, growing out of the white sand that spreads far and
 flat;
 Rude boats descending the big Pedee--climbing plants, parasites, with
 color'd flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees,
 The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low,
 noiselessly waved by the wind; 30
 The camp of Georgia wagoners, just after dark--the supper-fires, and
 the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
 Thirty or forty great wagons--the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from
 troughs,
 The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees--
 the flames--with the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling
 and rising;
 Southern fishermen fishing--the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's
 coast--the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery--the large
 sweep-seines--the windlasses on shore work'd by horses--the
 clearing, curing, and packing-houses;
 Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the
 incisions in the trees--There are the turpentine works,
 There are the negroes at work, in good health--the ground in all
 directions is cover'd with pine straw:
 --In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the
 forge, by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking;
 In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence,
 joyfully welcom'd and kiss'd by the aged mulatto nurse;
 On rivers, boatmen safely moor'd at night-fall, in their boats, under
 shelter of high banks,
 Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle--
 others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking; 40
 Late in the afternoon, the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing
 in the Great Dismal Swamp--there are the greenish waters, the
 resinous odor, the plenteous moss, the cypress tree, and the
 juniper tree;
 --Northward, young men of Mannahatta--the target company from an
 excursion returning home at evening--the musket-muzzles all
 bear bunches of flowers presented by women;
 Children at play--or on his father's lap a youn