I chant not of the past only but the future,
I am the bard of the future,
Songs of continued years I sing.

The past and present wilt, I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future,
The perform’d grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,
The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.

To think of today, and the ages continued henceforward—
Life and nature are not great with reference to the present only, but greater still from what is yet to come,
This year, sending itself ahead countless years to come.
Slowly and surely they have passed on to this,
And slowly and surely they yet pass on,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,
Sweeping the present to the infinite future.

Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is today nothing? is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.
Past, present, future, are you and me,
All that we are, the solid and liquid we are, we have advanced to,
We have advanced from what was our own cohesion and formation,
We advance to just as much more, and just as much more.

Thought of what was once lacking on earth, and in due time has become supplied—and of what will yet be supplied:
All I see and know I believe to have its main purport in what will yet be supplied,
What is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same,
The world, the human race, the soul—in space and time, the universes,
Are all bound as is befitting each—all surely going somewhere;
Time suffices, and the laws suffice,
The law of the present and future cannot be eluded.

Amelioration is the blood that runs through the body of the universe,
Amelioration is my lesson, and progress is my lesson, (it appears to say,)
I do not lag, I do not hasten,
I bide my hour over billions of billions of years,
I exist in the void that takes uncounted time,
I could be balked no-how.

If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this minute reduced back a pallid float—into the impalpable film of chaos—it would not avail in the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

Amelioration is the lesson of all things—
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

Still the future I harbinge,
Select, adorn the future, glad and sublime,
Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.
Man is in process of being,
His justification is not in himself, today,
But in something yet to come—something ahead.

Of men or states, few realize how much they live in the future;
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed,
How few see the arrived models—how all triumphs and glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward.
While many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain—
What, even of the best and most successful, would be justified by itself alone?
By the present, or the material ostent alone?
When all the future, the unknown, is waiting for you.

What has been done is consumed,
Ever, out of its ashes, let new, sweeter, more amicable fruits ripen,
Drawing from the very decay of the past a vigorous life for the future—
That, rising like pinnacles, gives its main significance to all you and I are doing today,
Without it, there were little meaning or purport in human lives.

The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern learning, intuitions deep,
Is that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering—
The great idea of humanity is progress,
Sure as man was prepared for upon the earth,
He makes his resistless progress through time, over all impediments,
The foot of man unstay’d, the hands never at rest,
The march of progress cannot be stayed.

An unbroken chain of sequence, causes and effects, runs through the progress of history and man,
Sometimes a long interregnum—sometimes a retrogression,
But still by degrees, a sure resistless progress has been made, no matter how slow,
And coming on with renewed vigor from all retrogrades and delays.

I should not refuse to see and welcome anyone who came to violate the precedents,
On the contrary I am looking about for just such men.
But a lot of the fresh things are not new,
They are only repetitions after all,
They do not seem to take life forward but to take it back;
I look for the new things, the old things, that take life forward.

I am well aware what floats suspended in you, you future, as qualities float suspended in the air,
The future is in me as a seed or nascent thought;
Outlining what is yet to be, I project the history of the future—
New history! New heroes! I project you!
Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,
O future too immense, O heights too swift and dizzy yet!
(Sometimes I see in ye, disease and death, the fear of evolution, knowledge, growth, reaching beyond the bounds—and so cut short.)

I am content with the grand, sweeping advance,
But we cannot be stopped at a given point—that is no satisfaction,
I think the soul will never stop, nor attain to any growth beyond which it shall not go.
Under whatever conditions, the human race would have its struggles, trials, growls, doubts, horrors,
If all it now asked for were achieved, it would then solicit more—more and more.
The human critter is just that sort of a being—and best so, no doubt,
A main part of the greatness of humanity is that it never is able to say, Now, as I stand, I am fixed forever,
If anyone has the feeling to say, I am fixed—and retains that feeling—
Then a longer or shorter farewell to the greatness of that humanity.

To show us a good thing or a few good things for a space of time—that is no satisfaction,
We must have the indestructible breed of the best, regardless of time;
The idea which towers over the rest is the idea of the all-successful, final certainties of each individual man, as well as of the world he inhabits.

The future is no more uncertain than the present—
None has begun to think how certain the future is,
The purport of us here is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

Of course all will be well,
What will be will be well, for what is is well.
What behaved well in the past or behaves well today is not such a wonder,
Whatever has grown, has grown well—
Every hour the semen of centuries, and still of centuries,
Do you fancy there is some water in the semen of perpetual copulation?
Do you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?

What is is well, for, of any fact or condition whatever, nothing but such as they could have come out of such as underlay or underlies them,
They are also to underlie what could be built upon nothing better than them.
Sure as the geological developments follow each other in steady and beautiful order,
Anything is as good as established, when that is established that will produce it and continue it.

O days of the future I believe in you,
I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it it will prove sufficient and cannot fail,
Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail.
It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,
Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again,
Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall,
Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d,
Nor anything in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,
Nor anything in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them,
Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.

The first intent remains, and shall be carried out:
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d together,
The puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin’d!
Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified,
The wrong’d made right.

Don’t you think all this inevitable?
Perhaps even now the time has arrived—
After all, I am an optimist,
I want to stamp a greater hope and faith, an optimism, on the age.

NEXT: THE ETERNAL PRESENT

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).