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.

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

Listen to:

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun (1:20)

by Walt Whitman 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,

Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows,

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape,

Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching

    content,

Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the

    Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can

    walk undisturb'd,

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire,

Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the

    world a rural domestic life,

Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only,

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal

    sanities!

On the Prospect of Planting Arts & Learning

"American Progress" (1873) by George Crogut

Listen to:

On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning (1:43)

by George Berkeley

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime
  Barren of every glorious theme,
In distant lands now waits a better time,
  Producing subjects worthy fame.

In happy climes, where from the genial sun      
  And virgin earth such scenes ensue,
The force of art by nature seems outdone,
  And fancied beauties by the true;

In happy climes, the seat of innocence,
  Where nature guides and virtue rules,      
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
  The pedantry of courts and schools:

There shall be sung another golden age,
  The rise of empire and of arts,
The good and great inspiring epic rage,      
  The wisest heads and noblest hearts.

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
  Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
  By future poets shall be sung.      

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
  The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
  Time’s noblest offspring is the last.