Stretch’d and still lies the clear midnight,
Midnight’s silent glowing northern lights unreachable.
To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius,
Consider them under the stars at midnight.

After an interval reading, solitary at midnight, my thoughts gone from me a long while, I felt a gnawing something—a void—so I took some cakes and ate them alone, in the dark, in the dead silence.

Did you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies? It is something not to be forgotten. You could hear the characteristic motion—once or twice the rush of mighty wings, but oftener a velvety rustle, long drawn out—sometimes quite near—with continual calls and chirps. I thought it rare music.

Imagination has thrown her glory around the midnight,
The orbs of heaven, the silence, the shadows are steeped in poetry—
It is I, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

My head on the pillow rests at home, and the vacant midnight passes,
Through the stillness, through the dark, I hear, just hear, the breath of my infant,
While my wife at my side slumbering, and the wars are over long.

In midnight sleep, I dream, I dream, I dream,
Of troops out of the war arising,
Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
Of their forms at night in clouds descending,
Of the look of the mortally wounded, of that indescribable look,
Of many a face of anguish.

Why this is indeed a show—it has called the dead out of the earth!
The slain elate and alive again, noiseless as mists and vapors,
From their graves in the trenches ascending, filling the midnight late.
The apparitions copiously tumbling, trooping tumultuous, parting the midnight,
In wafted clouds they come, entering my slumber-chamber,
And silently gather round me, bending me powerless.

O how the immortal phantoms crowd around me!
Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear!
A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
Arms in slings—old men leaning on young men’s shoulders,
Cock’d hats of mothy mould—crutches made of mist!

O wild and dismal night storm, with wind,
O belching and desperate!
Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,
Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering.
A pause—the armies wait,
That savage trinity warily watching,
A million flush’d embattled conquerors wait,
Then soft as breaking night and sure as dawn,
They melt, they disappear.

Low hangs the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight—
‘Tis the twilight of the dawn,
The hour of shining stars and dropping dews.

Emerging from the nightfrom gloomy thoughts,
I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
A show of breaking dawn, as some dissolving delicate film of dreams.
I too pass from the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night,
The night as it passes soothing and renewing the whole frame—
I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
And awake.

I love the rich running day,
But I do not desert her in whom I lay so long,
I stay a while away O night,
But I return to you again and love you.
Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you,
I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you,
But I know I came well and shall go well.

I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes,
I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you.

NEXT: SEASONS OF THE YEAR

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).