1.1. Song of the Redwood-Tree
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A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air,
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A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing,
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A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
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Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.
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Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,
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My time has ended, my term has come.
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Along the northern coast,
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Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,
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In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,
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With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
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With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
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Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood
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I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting.
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The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not,
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The quick-ear'd teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,
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As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to
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But in my soul I plainly heard.
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Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
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Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high,
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Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,
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That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but
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You untold life of me,
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And all you venerable and innocent joys,
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Perennial hardy life of me with joys 'mid rain and many a summer sun,
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And the white snows and night and the wild winds;
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O the great patient rugged joys, my soul's strong joys unreck'd by man,
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(For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,
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And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,)
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Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
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Our time, our term has come.
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Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,
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We who have grandly fill'd our time,
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With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight,
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We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
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And leave the field for them.
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For them predicted long,
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For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time,
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For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings.'
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In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks, Shasta, Nevadas,
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These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys, far Yosemite,
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To be in them absorb'd, assimilated.
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Then to a loftier strain,
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Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant,
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As if the heirs, the deities of the West,
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Joining with master-tongue bore part.
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Not wan from Asia's fetiches,
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Nor red from Europe's old dynastic slaughter-house,
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(Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and
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But come from Nature's long and harmless throes, peacefully builded thence,
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These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore,
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To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new,
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You promis'd long, we pledge, we dedicate.
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You occult deep volitions,
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You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois'd on yourself,
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giving not taking law,
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You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and
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love and aught that comes from life and love,
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You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, age
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upon age working in death the same as life,)
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You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould
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the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space,
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You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal'd but ever alert,
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You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued, may-be
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unconscious of yourselves,
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Unswerv'd by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface;
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You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts,
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statutes, literatures,
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Here build your homes for good, establish here, these areas entire,
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lands of the Western shore,
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We pledge, we dedicate to you.
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For man of you, your characteristic race,
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Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature,
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Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck'd by wall or roof,
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Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently inure,
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Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others' formulas heed,)
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To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last,
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To disappear, to serve.
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Thus on the northern coast,
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In the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains, and the
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music of choppers' axes,
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The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan,
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Such words combined from the redwood-tree, as of voices ecstatic,
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The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing,
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All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving,
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From the Cascade range to the Wahsatch, or Idaho far, or Utah,
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To the deities of the modern henceforth yielding,
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The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity, the
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settlements, features all,
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In the Mendocino woods I caught.
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The flashing and golden pageant of California,
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The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands,
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The long and varied stretch from Puget sound to Colorado south,
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Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air, valleys and mountain cliffs,
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The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow, the silent, cyclic chemistry,
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The slow and steady ages plodding, the unoccupied surface ripening,
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the rich ores forming beneath;
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At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,
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A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere,
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Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the
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To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises
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Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers,
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the railroads, with many a thrifty farm, with machinery,
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And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.
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But more in you than these, lands of the Western shore,
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(These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,)
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I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years,
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Promis'd to be fulfill'd, our common kind, the race.
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The new society at last, proportionate to Nature,
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In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial,
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In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air.
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Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared,
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I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
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Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of
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To build a grander future.
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