Strictly speaking, the people have no right to complain of being hampered and cheated and
hoodwinked and overtaxed and insulted, for they always hold the remedy in their own hands. I have little hope of any man, or any community of men, that looks to some civil or military power to defend its vital rights. There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.

If we have it not in ourselves to defend what belongs to us, then the citadel and heart of the towns are taken,
Tyranny may always enter; there is no charm, no bar against it.
The only bar against it is a large, resolute breed of men—
A few resolute and enthusiastic men, who believe in the inalienable right of every human being to his life, his liberty, and his rational pursuit of happiness, are more than a match for thousands.

Just so long, in any country, as no revolutionists advance, and are backed by the people,
Just so long do they who are in power fairly represent that country.
The show passes, all does well enough of course,
All does very well—till one flash of defiance—
How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!
How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a man’s or woman’s look!

All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears,
When he or she appears materials are overaw’d,
The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn’d back, or laid away,
He or she is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe.

Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace,
I hold up agitation and conflict,
I like and welcome all agitation, even the fiercest,
I love screaming, wrestling, boiling-hot days.

I think things are as good as they can be, all right as they are, including the agitation! Especially the agitation! Indeed, I might think agitation the most important factor of all—to stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!
Without the questioner, the agitator, the disturber, to hit away at our complacency, we’d get into a pretty pass indeed. Agitation is the test of the goodness and solidness of all politics and law and institutions and religions. If they cannot stand it, there is no genuine life in them, and they shall die.

No doubt good will issue out of all this agitation. There is always occasion for courage and determined power and defiance, launching into the self-complacent atmosphere of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock. All that is great and grand in any political organization in the world, is the result of turbulence and destructiveness. All great emotions, agitations, etc., produce the mightiest ameliorating results. 

As circulation to air, so is agitation, and a plentiful degree of speculative license, to political and moral sanity. The great redeeming movements and revolutions of the world have been those which have been mainly for an idea, to meet dagger with more than dagger—with science, art, the buttress of philosophy.

Things drive us on—the God damned robbers, fools, stupids, who ride their gay horses over the bodies of the crowd, they drive us on—God knows to what—but they’ll drive us into an inevitable resentment, then revolt, of some sort.
Sometimes I don’t like to think of it. The prospect of it all would make me shudder if I didn’t know that something must happen, that we can’t push on much farther in this direction. There are times when the house cannot be patched any more but asks to be taken down.

The long precedent crushing of the masses into the earth, in abject poverty, hunger,
Every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back for generations,
The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,
The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates—
Yet nature’s force, titanic, though long repressed, can never be destroyed,
The bullets of tyrants have, since the first king ruled, never been able to put down the unquenchable thirst of man for his rights.

There burns, almost with fierceness, an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul that cannot, must not, under any circumstances, capitulate—the divine fire which more or less, during all ages, has only waited a chance to leap forth and confound the calculations of the tyrants and all their tribe.

Here, the stronger and hardier for that repression, waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful,
Here too demanding full arrears of vengeance,
Here too the blaze could rise at last murdering and ecstatic,
Here too the blaze, the grape-shot and the axe, in reserve, to fetch them out in case of need.

I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over,
Songs of stern defiance ever ready,
Though the one I sing I dedicate to nationality, I leave in him revolt,
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion.
O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless, indispensable fire!
Vive, the unpopular cause—the spirit that audaciously aims—the never-abandon’d efforts,
Vive, the attack—the perennial assault! 

I am the god of revolt—deathless, sorrowful, vast,
Lifted now and always against whoever scorning assumes to rule me, whoever oppresses me.
I have been wronged—I am oppressed—
I hate him that oppresses me,
I am lurid with rage!

Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,
I am justified of myself,
Damn him! how he does defile me!
This day or some other I will have him and the like of him to do my will upon,
I will either destroy him or he shall release me,
Never more to wield the sceptre lost by his imprudence and tyranny.

Those appear that are hateful to me,
For a hundred years I will pursue those who have injured me so much,
I invoke revenge to assist me,
I will not listen; I will not spare,
They shall not hide themselves in their graves,
I will pursue them thither,
Out with them from their coffins!
Out with them from their shrouds!
Though they hide themselves under the lappets of God I will pursue them there,
I will drag them out,
The lappets of God shall not protect them.

I am a curse, sharper than serpent’s eyes or wind of the ice-fields,
O topple down curse! topple more heavy than death!
The sweet marches of heaven shall be stopped with my maledictions:
Let fate pursue them,
May the genitals and womb that begat them rot,
I do not know any horror that is dreadful enough for them,
What is the worst whip you have?

The pressure on the dykes, and the bursting at last—
Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
Like lightning it le’pt forth half startled at itself,
The people scorn’d the ferocity of kings,
Feet upon the ashes and the rags, hands tight to the throats of kings,
God, ’twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip upon the throats of kings,
Sombre, superb and terrible,
As Ahimoth, brother of Death.

I saw the divine infant where she woke mournfully wailing, amid the roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of falling buildings,
Was not so shock’d at the repeated fusillades of the guns,
Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running, nor from the single corpses, nor those in heaps, 
I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism.

Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?
Could I wish humanity different?
Could I wish the people made of wood and stone?
Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
Alone among thy sisters thou, giantess, didst rend the ones that shamed thee,
For thy errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke thee,
Thy unexampled woes and pangs have quell’d them all,
And left thee sacred.

Then courage revolter, revoltress!
Courage yet, my brother or my sister!
You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you.

Resist much, obey little,
Beat the gong of revolt, symbol of my soul, its dearest hopes,
Revolt! and still revolt! revolt!
Abate not one jot of your fullest radicalism,
For till all ceases neither must you cease the struggle and the daring, rage divine for liberty.

NEXT:  LIBERTY IS NEVER DEFEATED

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).