"Seasons Pursuing Each Other" - excerpt from Song of Myself

Listen to:

Seasons Pursuing Each Other (1:23)

by Walt Whitman

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows,

    and the winter-grain falls in the ground;

Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in

    the frozen surface,

The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep

    with his axe,

Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,

Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through

    those drain'd by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,

Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,

Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons

    around them,

In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after

    their day's sport,

The city sleeps and the country sleeps,

The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,

The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.