Keep Your Splendid Silent Sun

Listen to:

Keep Your Splendid Silent Sun (2:21)

by Walt Whitman 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Keep your splendid silent sun,

Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,

Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,

Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;

Give me faces and streets--give me these phantoms incessant and

    endless along the trottoirs!

Give me interminable eyes--give me women--give me comrades and

    lovers by the thousand!

Let me see new ones every day--let me hold new ones by the hand every day!

Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!

Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching--give me the sound of

    the trumpets and drums!

(The soldiers in companies or regiments--some starting away, flush'd

    and reckless,

Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very

    old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)

Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!

O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!

The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!

The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the

    torchlight procession!

The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons

    following;

People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,

Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,

The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even

    the sight of the wounded,)

Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!

Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.