I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
I will want my utterances (I said to myself before beginning) to be in spirit the poems of the morning.

The song of me rising from bed:
I will sleep no more but arise as Adam early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep—
Behold my resurrection, after slumber,
Glad as morning light,
In the eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning.
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so—
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

Just before sunrise again, (a favorite hour with me,)
The clear gray sky, a faint glow in the dull liver-color of the east, the cool fresh odor and the moisture,
We rise up refresh’d, the night and sleep pass’d over.
Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day, walking the world, the real,
Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream,
Poems vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.

O the sweetness of the morning just before sunrise,
Here waiting for the sunrise, gazing from this hill, to behold the daybreak.
A heavy haze contends with daybreak,
The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable.
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
An immense star, almost unearthly in its effusion of white splendor, with two or three long unequal spoke-rays of diamond radiance, shedding down through the fresh morning air below.

As I went forth in the morning, as I beheld the light breaking in the east,
Clouds of pale gold and transparent crimson draperied the eastern sky,
But the sun, whose face gladden’d them into all that glory, was not yet above the horizon.
What subtle tie is this between one’s soul and the break of day?
It was a time and place of such rare, such Eden-like beauty!
An hour of this, and then the sunrise.

The song of me meeting the sun:
O morning red! the rosy and elastic dawn,
The noiseless splash of sunrise—
Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul bathed by the rising sun,
With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene.
Quietly over the dense fringe of cedars and pines rises that dazzling, red, transparent disk of flame,
The sun cloudless and mellow-warm, the light and warmth indescribably glorious,
And the low sheets of white vapor roll and roll into dissolution.

The great round face of the sun comes along in the morning,
l am ready to receive him at his first appearance,
The flashing sun almost seems to kiss me with a loving kiss—
The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the sun is risen:
The crowing cock at dawn;
The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted, with musical clear call at sunrise;
The dawn-bird’s throat sounds shrill! the unrivall’d one, the hermit thrush;
What a stamp in advance my whole day receives at sunrise from the pure clear song of that meadowlark perch’d on a fence-stake,
With glad notes of daybreak, two or three liquid-simple notes, repeated at intervals, full of careless happiness and hope.

Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high,
The flashing sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions, silently mounts in the broad clear sky.
Looking at the sun as it rose, (so tell I my morning’s romanza,) a round red glistening ball through the vapory morning,
Did you think the sun was shining its brightest?
No—it has not yet fully risen.
“Don’t it look pretty?” said one,
“Yes,” said the other, “but it looks mighty ambitious.”

I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning,
The heralded morning, ineffably sweet and fresh and limpid,
Nothing can be fresher or more beautiful than this time—
The night has passed and the day appears when people walk abroad—to do evil or to do good.
At a bounteous morning meal sat peaceful parents with contented sons,
In the distance the sounds of children and of animals early in the day—
Those nice breakfasts were bright spots, and I shall not forget them.

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturb’d,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak, and all through the forenoon,
The smell of the woods in the morning,
The delicious scent of the life everlasting that yet lingers so profusely in every direction.

O fair auroral skies—O morning dew upon the grass! 
The wet of woods through the early hours,
The forenoon purple of the hills,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
In the freshness the soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west.

Let me specially record the satisfaction of this current forenoon, so serene and primitive, so conventionally exceptional, natural—
The loving day, the mounting sun from cloudless skies, the forenoon well advanc’d.

Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
Is it not just as great, O soul?

Fresh as the morning,
Thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

NEXT: AFTERNOON