A song of the good green grass!
A song of the soil of the fields,
A song with the smell of sun-dried hay,
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize—
Over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, the chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.

The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The placid pastoral plains and emerald meadows,
Plenty of fair pasture, with cattle and horses feeding,
Grazing lands sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie,
(The plains were own’d by the towns, and this was the use of them in common.)

What most impress’d me, and will longest remain with me, are these prairies,
Land of sweet-air’d interminable plateaus, the table-lands notched with ravines,
Land of the wild ravine, the lonesome stretch, the silence,
That vast something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined.
O space boundless!
One wants new words in writing about these plains—the terms, far, large, vast, etc., are insufficient.

The sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky,
To my eyes, to all my senses, the esthetic one most of all, they silently and broadly unfolded—
Storm blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
Sundown shadows over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
The peculiar sentiment of moonlight and stars over the great plains,
The receding perspective, and the far circle-line of the horizon all times of day,
Around all, the indescribable chiaroscuro and sentiment, (profounder than anything at sea,) athwart these endless wilds.

Passing the endless grass, the measureless pasturages,
I thought my eyes had never looked on scenes of greater pastoral beauty,
These limitless and beautiful landscapes indeed fill me best and most—
Calm, pensive, boundless landscapes,
Combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams,
How freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the soul.

Others may praise what they like, but I praise nothing in art or aught else till it has well inhaled the western prairie-scent, and exudes it all again—smelling the earth’s smells, its special odor breathing—winds blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting, the prairie-grass dividing—the clear, pure, cool, rarefied nutriment for the lungs.

I wonder if the people of the prairies know how much art, original and all their own, they have in those rolling and grassy plains,
What a profound cast and bearing they will have on their coming populations—
Free and original life there,
Broader, newer, more patriotic, more heroic than ever before,
Better comrades than ever before,
Litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there,
Immense spiritual results future years—
These songs, strains for the soul of the prairies, well understood there. 

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows, a sunlit pasture field, 
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
The broad muscular fields, the grass-fields of the world,
The emerald green of the grass spreading everywhere, 
The liliput countless armies of the manifold grass;
Long and long has the grass been growing,
The rich coverlet of the eternal grass.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he,
I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation,
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Give me, O deathless grass, of you,
Deathless grass, so noiseless soft and green,
The beautiful uncut hair of graves,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps,
Sprouts, tokens ever of death indeed the same as life.

Something startles me where I thought I was safest—
Earth! huge tomb-yard of humanity,
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses,
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you today—or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough,
I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

On these days of brightness, on the far-stretching beauteous landscape, should the dead intrude?
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
As I lay reclining on the grass, how can I not catch some disease?
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me,
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—
I do not see how there can be anything but disease.

The fruits of the apple orchard, I feared they would poison me, but they do not,
The orange orchard, the melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
When I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once catching disease,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

Behold this compost! behold it well! this compost of billions of premature corpses!
The fields of nature long prepared and fallow, different objects decay,
And by the chemistry of nature, the silent, cyclic chemistry, their bodies are turned into spears of grass,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, with long and rustling leaves,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
I hear the bustle of growing wheat,
The resurrection of the wheat with pale visage out of its graves.

Ah the dead to me mar not, they fit well in nature,
They fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass,
What chemistry! the essences of creation, and the changes,
And the growth and formations and decays of so large a constituent part of the earth,
A thousand forms shall rise from these dead clods as from low burial graves,
To the garden, the world, anew ascending.

Now I am terrified at the earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Oh dirt, you corpse, I think you are good manure,
But that does not offend me, that I do not smell,
I scent the grass, the moist air, and the roses,
I smell your beautiful white roses, sweet-scented and growing,
The smell of apples, aromas from crushed sage plant, mint, birch-bark,
Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers,
The prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume.

All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me,
The far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn,
The shows of all the varied lands and all the growths and products,
Limitless  crops—wheat, sugar, corn, rice, hemp, hops,
Patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
Fields and rolling country and interminable farms, like paradise;
Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind.

Welcome are lands of wheat and maize.
The bronze and gold of nearly ripen’d wheat,
The young grain bent to the early breeze,
The yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green.

The tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn, the sturdy stalks, and the rustling in the breeze,
The long and pointed leaves like green or purple ribands, with a yellow stem-line in the middle,
With beautiful ears each well-sheath’d in its husk, slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels,
Truly, in color, outline, material and spiritual suggestiveness, where any more inclosing theme for idealist, poet, literary artist?

Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
The dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze,
Fields of teff-wheat and places of verdure and gold,
Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

Welcome are lands of gold,
Welcome the teeming soil of orchards, flax, honey, hemp, the growing sugar,
The yellow-flower’d cotton plant, the rice in its low moist field,
The white and brown buckwheat, the delicate blue-flower flax.

Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig, tamarind, date, the polish’d breasts of melons—
O lavish brown parturient earth! O infinite teeming womb!
I kiss your leafy lips,
I slide my hands for the brown melons of your breasts.

Welcome are lands of the grape, the esculent roots of the garden, the patches of briers and blackberries,
The running blackberries, so flavorous and juicy, would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And huckleberries from the woods distill joyous deliriums,
My favorite dish: currants and raspberries, mixed, sugar’d, fresh and ripe from the bushes,
I go out and pick the currants myself, great red things—how juicy and cool they are!
And those blueberries? Their uselessness growing wild, their content in being let alone—
A certain aroma of nature I would so like to have in my pages.

Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,
Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc, iron, from the mother’s bowels drawn,
Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,
The rich ores forming beneath,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Vexing we and piercing deep the mines within.

O flowers of these interminable and stately prairies! 
Wild flowers, oceans of them, scatter’d in profusion over the fields—
White and red morning-glories, and white and red clover,
The tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk,
The golden dandelions in endless profusion,
The cactuses, pinks, buffalo grass, wild sage.

Placid mulleins growing everywhere in the fields, so fresh and dewy in the morning, broad leaves glittering with countless diamonds,
Milky blossom of the wild carrot, delicate pat of snowflakes crowning its tall and slender stem, gracefully oscillating in the breeze,
The milk-weed with its delicate red fringe, and profuse clusters of a feathery blossom waving in the wind on taper stems.

The superb wonder of a blade of grass growing up green and crispy from the ground,
Every motion and every spear of grass,
The commonest weeds by the road—
I demand the spiritual corresponding,
Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
Those of the open atmosphere, those of earth-born passion,
Simple, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious.

NEXT: CREATURES OF THE EARTH

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).