And once when I had made complaint

About America, she warned me: “Be not faint

Of heart, but bold to see the soul’s advance.

The chances are not far nor few....

Face beauty,” Celia said, “then beauty faces you.”

And under all things her advice was true.

... Discovering what she knew,

Not only on a mountainous place

Or by the solving sea

But through the world I have seen endless beauty, as the number grows

Of those who, in a child cheated of simple joy

Or in a wasted rose

Or in a lover’s immemorial lonely eyes

Or in machines that quicken and destroy

A multitude or in a mother’s unregarded grace

And broken heart, through all the skies

And all humanity,

Seek out the single spirit, face to face,

Find it, become a conscious part of it

And know that something pure and exquisite,

Although inscrutably begun,

Surely exalts the many into one.

“I shall not lose, nor you,”

I said to Celia. Over the world the morning-dew

Moved like a hymn and sang to us: “Go now, fulfill

Your destiny and joy;

Each in the other, both in that Italian boy,

And he in you, like flowers in a hill!”

... She was the nearness of imperfect God

On whom in her perfection was at work.

Lest I should shirk

My share, I asked her for His blessing and His nod—

And His breath was in her shining hair like the wind in golden-rod.

“But, Celia, Celia, tell me what to be,”

I asked, “and what to do,

To keep your faith in me,

To witness mine in you!”

She answered: “Dare to see

In every man and woman everywhere

The making of us two.

See none that we can spare

From the creation of our soul.

Swear to be whole.

Let not your faith abate,

But establish it in persons and exalt it in the state.”

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 come

With 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 while

And 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 old

And take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth....