The sky overarches here,
I feel the vast space of the sky overhead so clear,
The free space of the sky, a wonderfully fine dome, transparent and blue,
The limpid spread of air cerulean,
Pellucid blue and silver tempering and arching all the immense materiality,
A vast, voiceless, formless simulacrum—
Yet maybe the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?

Every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before.
The days are full of sunbeams and oxygen,
The slight settling haze of aerial moisture,
The daylight is lit with more volatile light,
I am jealous and overwhelm’d with friendliness,
A contact of something unseen—an amour of the light and air.

Hast thou, pellucid, in thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine?
And dost thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly upon me?
The sky and the peacefulness expanding in all directions and overhead, fill and soothe me,
My soul is calm’d and expanded beyond description by the clear blue arching over all,
Nothing particular, only sky and daylight,
The play of light coming and going—
Light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!

I will go gallivant with the light and the air myself,
Lie on my back and breathe and live in that sweet air and clear sunlight,
Not asking the sky to come down to my goodwill,
Scattering it freely forever.

Glistening sun today, with slight haze, warm enough, and yet tart—
I carol the sun, usher’d, or at noon, or setting,
Hear me illustrious,
As now to thee I launch my invocation,
My special word to thee.

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
The most excellent sun so amazing and broad, so calm and haughty,
The sun rejoices in his strength, dazzling and burning,
Up there resplendent, darting and burning!

Shine! shine! shine! O sun,
Thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of flame gigantic,
I understand them, I know those flames, those perturbations well, even as basking babe,
Or man matured, or young or old,
And here I am, still basking in the unveiled sunshine,
I have walk’d down the lane, basking all the way in the sun,
A warm languor bathes me, a warm elasticity pervading the air,
The warm beams with fructifying heat come streaming kissingly and almost hot on my face.

Pour down your warmth, great sun,
Thou that impartially infoldest all, bathe all, not only continents, seas,
Thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally.
Gorgeous orb imperial, so vast, so ardently, lovingly hot,
Radiant, ablaze, swift-moving, fructifying all,
Shed, shed thyself on mine and me, with but a fleeting ray out of thy million millions.

If I worship one thing more than another,
Sun so generous it shall be you,
Thy lover me, for always I have loved thee,
Electric life forever at the centre.

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, and with wondrous clouds,
I see, just see skyward, the stretching light-hung roof of cloud.
See those now, the passing clouds, silver and luminous-tawny,
How they go and go, tireless and without number,
Distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes, rolling silver-fringed clouds,
The clear cerulean and the silvery fringes,
With silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding,
Great fleeces of spacious white clouds, little or larger white ones, limpid, spiritual,
Swimming so silently, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave.

Wonderful how the sailing clouds aloft pass silently overhead,
Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising, freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.
It has always been one of my finer joys to watch the varied, varying, ever-changing, interlocking cloud-shapes,
The tumbling gorgeousness of the great cloud-masses—
Gorgeous clouds, drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me,
Fitted to the sky, to float with floating clouds.

Heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin haze,
I see the thin haze on the tall white steeples of the city,
The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor,
Strata of colored clouds, swift sheets of flitting vapor-gauze,
The vapor in fleeces tinged with violet,
Amid the whirl, absent or dead friends, the old, the past, somehow tenderly suggested.

Thin swift passing clouds, like lace, blown overhead during a storm,
Careering, all silently, yet driven as if by the furies they sweep along,
Follow’d by dense and murky clouds throwing an inky pall on everything,
Dark smoke-color’d clouds that roll in furious silence athwart the sky,
Vast, deep, slatey masses, hurrying across the sky, chasing one another,
Ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading—
Sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Mournfully they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
Like bodies of armed men coming up to battle at the call of their leader’s trumpet.

Out of the murk of heaviest clouds, I see in the distance where the sun shines!
I stand and look under a limpid gray cloud, brighter and clearer for my sake!

After the perturb’d winds and the storms, the clouds dispel’d, swiftly drew off like curtains, the clear appear’d, nature smiled again in her invigorated beauty. The sun shone out as it was dipping in the west, and with it the fairest, grandest, most wondrous rainbow I ever saw— all complete, very vivid at its earth-ends, spreading vast effusions of illuminated haze, violet, yellow, drab-green, in all directions overhead, through which the sun beam’d—an indescribable utterance of color and light, so gorgeous yet so soft, gladdening the sun and sky. 

NEXT: THE NIGHTTIME SKY

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).