Come, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted;
Sing me the Universal.
In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed Perfection.
By every life a share, or more or less,
None born but it is born—conceal'd or unconceal'd,
the seed is waiting.
Lo! keen-eyed, towering Science!
As from tall peaks the Modern overlooking,
Successive, absolute flats issuing.
Yet again, lo! the Soul—above all science;
For it, has History gather'd like husks around the
globe;
For it, the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.
In spiral roads, by long detours,
(As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
For it, the partial to the permanent flowing,
For it, the Real to the Ideal tends.
For it, the mystic evolution;
Not the right only justified—what we call evil also
justified.
Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge, festering trunk—from craft and guile
and tears,
Health to emerge, and joy—joy universal.
Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority—the varied, countless frauds
of men and States,
Electric, antiseptic yet—cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the Good is universal.
***
fragment of SONG OF THE UNIVERSAL,
BY WALT WHITMAN.
(17 June 1874)
