The wonderfulness of insects in the air—swarms of flitting insects,
The beautiful, spiritual insects!

Two large dragon-flies, with wings of slate-color’d lace gauze, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time;
Two little yellow butterflies shuffling between each other, ascending high in the air,
I hardly look around without somewhere seeing two (always two) fluttering through the air in amorous dalliance.

Many varieties of beautiful and plain butterflies, myriads,
Idly flapping among the plants and wild posies,
Mostly skimming along the surface, dipping and oscillating,
Now and then some gorgeous fellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists’ palettes dabb’d with every color.
You can tame even such insects,
I have one big and handsome moth, knows and comes to me,
Likes me to hold him up on my extended hand.

Up and down the lane, the darting, droning, musical bumble-bees. Here I sit long and long, envelop’d in the perpetual rich mellow bumble-bee symphony. They dart to and fro, large and vivacious and swift, conveying to me a new and pronounc’d sense of strength, beauty, vitality and movement.
The hairy wild-bee murmurs and hankers up and down, gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied.

All sorts of birds, darting, hopping, or perch’d on trees,
Such oceans, such successions of them.
I see the parrots in the woods,
Bluebird and darting swallow, the destroyer of insects,
The band-necked partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out,
Nor forget the high-hole flashing his golden wings.

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
The katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well;
The song of the locust gushes, has meaning—
A long, chromatic, tremulous crescendo, monotonous,
But what a swing there is in that brassy drone, round and round, emitting wave after wave of notes,
Like the whirling of brass quoits,
Like some fine old wine, not sweet, but far better than sweet,
Reaching a point of great energy and significance,
Then quickly and gracefully dropping down and out.

I hear bravuras of birds,
Especially at the beginning of the day, and again at the ending, I get the most copious bird-concerts.
But never before have I been in the midst of, and got so flooded and saturated with, them and their performances,
One little bird lurks in the background, and sings by himself,
Then all the birds strike in together, 
And there is a real concert going on around me,
The noisy, vocal, natural concert,
A dozen different birds pitching in with a will.

The convocation of blackbirds, garrulous flocks of them, twittering, rising, or overhead passing;
The wild flageolet-note of a quail nearby, whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot;
Harsh cawing of many crows in the distance;
The screams of the water-fowl of solitary northwest lakes;
The low, oft-repeated shriek of the diver;
The fretful meow, meo-o-w of a querulous cat-bird, and the song of the phoebe-bird;
The wild-fowl’s notes at night as flying low migrating north or south, the notes of the bird continuous echoing;
The song of the wood-thrush, delicious notes—a sweet, artless, voluntary, simple anthem, as from the flute-stops of some organ;
The sad noises of the night-owl from recesses, too-oo-oo-oo-oo, soft and pensive (and I fancied a little sarcastic,) breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence;
The song of a single snow-bird merrily sounding over the desolation,
Of that blithe throat from arctic bleak and blank;
A feather’d recluse in the woods nearby singing deliciously—not many notes, but full of music of almost human sympathy.

In the swamp in secluded recesses, a shy and hidden bird is warbling a song,
From deep secluded recesses the carol of the bird,
The hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars;
Solitary, the unrivall’d one, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song, gurgle of thrush delicious.

I linger long to a delicious song-epilogue from some bushy recess in the path by the swamp in the dimness,
Wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night,
Repeated leisurely and pensively over and over again.

Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird, O singer bashful and tender,
Sing on dearest brother, sing from the swamps, the recesses,
Pour your chant from the bushes, warble your reedy song,
For well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.

The canary, and several other sweet birds, are wondrous fine—but there is something in song that goes deeper—isn’t there?
As I have walk’d in Alabama, 
I have seen where the she-bird the mockingbird sat on her nest in the briers hatching her brood,
I have seen the he-bird also,
I have paus’d to hear him near at hand inflating his throat and joyfully singing,
The mockingbird’s throat, the musical shuttle, joyfully sounds his delicious gurgles, and cackles and screams and weeps,
Singing bird divine! wonderful, causing tears;
While I paus’d it came to me that what he really sang for was subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.

I have a positive conviction that some of these birds sing, and others fly and flirt about here, for my special benefit—
I believe in those wing’d purposes,
I acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional.

The spotted hawk salutes the approaching night,
The hawk’s sharp scream—he swoops by and accuses me,
He complains hoarsely with sarcastic voice of my gab and my loitering.
From his masterful sweep, the warning cry of the eagle:
Give way there! It is useless—give up your spoils!

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
The pert may suppose it meaningless,
But listening close I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

Where the bat flies,
Where the hummingbird shimmers,
My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck,
They rise together, they slowly circle around;
Two great buzzards wheeling gracefully and slowly far up there,
Sail a slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs.

Two kingfishers pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around,
Winding, darting, with many a jocund downward dip,
Sometimes capriciously separate, then flying together,
As if they knew I appreciated and absorb’d their vitality, spirituality, faithfulness—
And then off they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight.

Myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts,
Seagulls high in the air, their broad and easy flight in spirals,
Floating with motionless wings, or oscillating their bodies with slow unflapping wings;
Here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds,
With their fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion.

High up in the transparent ether gracefully balanced and circled four or five great sea hawks,
The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail’d,
The farthest polar sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes—
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air.

Sometimes in the fiercest storm a great eagle will appear, now soaring with steady and now overbended wings—his resistless flight now a swirl, now an upward movement, now abandoning himself to the gale, moving with it with such velocity—lord of the situation and the storm—lord, amid it, of power and savage joy. It is like reading some first-class natural tragedy or epic, or hearing martial trumpets.

Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.

Man-of-war bird, that sport’st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)
Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renew’d on thy prodigious pinions,
The sky thy slave that cradled thee,
Thou ship of air that never furl’st thy sails,
Days, even weeks, untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating—
As to the light emerging here I watch thee,
A blue point, far, far in heaven floating,
In thy experiences, had’st thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine.

A haughty, white-bodied dark-wing’d hawk rose slowly, a magnificent sight, and sail’d with steady widespread wings, no flapping at all, in circles in clear sight, as if for my delectation; once he came quite close over my head.
Having studied the flight of the mountain-hawk,
As the spotted hawk wheels noisily near my head at nightfall,
A thrill of my own likeness strikes me—
O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?
Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?

O if one could but fly like a bird, to emerge and be of the sky,
Of the sun and moon and flying clouds, as one with them.

I fly the flight of the fluid and swallowing soul,
I fly like a bird,
With flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wildpigeon and highhold and orchard-oriole and coot and surf-duck and redshouldered-hawk and fish-hawk and white-ibis and indian-hen and cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and blackbird and mockingbird and buzzard and condor and night-heron and eagle. 

All islands to which birds wing their way, I wing my way myself,
I depart as air, screaming, with wings slow flapping,
I use the wings of the land-bird and use the wings of the sea-bird, and look down as from a height.
In vain the large black buzzard, floating slowly high beyond the treetops, houses herself with the sky,
In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

I have abandoned myself to flights, broad circles,
I circulate in all directions,
Around and around to soar,
Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,
I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.

NEXT: OF THE WATERS

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).