The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work, Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest Towers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams! You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold! O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven! O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun! The daring plots of the poets-the elder religions The far-darting beams of the spirit!-the unloos’d dreams! Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science!īut myths and fables of eld-Asia’s, Africa’s fables! Not you alone, proud truths of the world! So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)Įclaircise the myths Asiatic-the primitive fables. (As a projectile, form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on, The past! the infinite greatness of the past!įor what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past? The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows! The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect! I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul, The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires, In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal, Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,) Singing the strong, light works of engineers, Singing the great achievements of the present, For a short critical analysis, look at this section on American poetry. His verse argues that there are different ways of knowing-through scientific knowledge and through the wisdom of ancient stories. In 1869, Walt Whitman saw the opening of the Suez Canal as reason for celebration, for this new passage to India was both a marvel of engineering and an opportunity to connect with the spiritual traditions of faraway lands. Passage to India has several insightful and incisive section and is worth a read. As the first decade of the third millennium draws to a close (if you count like a computer geek), it is a good time to contemplate Whitman’s poem written well over a century ago. But re-reading his work in my current context as a US-based India Expert is a bit of an eye-opener. Whitman did not make much sense to back then. I got to enjoy the prose of Mark Twain and the poetry of Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. Growing up in north India, I was one of the few to attend a school with an American principal.
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