Year of Meteors, 1859 '60
YEAR of meteors! brooding year!
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;
I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand-silent I stood, with teeth shut close-I watch’d;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your
unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)
-I would sing in my copious song your census returns of The States,
The tables of population and products-I would sing of your ships and their cargoes,
The proud black ships of Manhattan, arriving, some fill’d with immigrants, some from
the
isthmus with cargoes of gold;
Songs thereof would I sing-to all that hitherward comes would I welcome give;
And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, sweet boy of England!
Remember you surging
nobles?
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;
I know not why, but I loved you… (and so go forth little song,
Far over sea speed like an arrow, carrying my love all folded,
And find in his palace the youth I love, and drop these lines at his feet;)
-Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,
Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600 feet long,
Her, moving swiftly, surrounded by myriads of small craft, I forget not to sing;
-Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven;
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
-Of such, and fitful as they, I sing-with gleams from them would I gleam and
patch
these
chants;
Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good! year of forebodings! year of the youth
I
love!
Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!-lo! even here, one equally
transient and
strange!
As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this book,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?
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