Famous Long How I Feel Poems

Starting from Paumanok

 1
STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born, 
Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother; 
After roaming many lands—lover of populous pavements; 
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city—or on southern savannas; 
Or a soldier camp’d, or carrying my knapsack and gun—or a miner in
 California;
Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from the
 spring; 
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess, 
Far from the clank of crowds, intervals passing, rapt and happy; 
Aware of the fresh free giver, the flowing Missouri—aware of mighty
 Niagara; 
Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains—the hirsute and
 strong-breasted bull;
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers, experienced—stars, rain, snow, my
 amaze; 
Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones, and the mountainhawk’s, 
And heard at dusk the unrival’d one, the hermit thrush from the
 swamp-cedars, 
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World. 

2Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, 
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports. 

This, then, is life; 
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. 

How curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil—overhead the sun. 

See, revolving, the globe; 
The ancestor-continents, away, group’d together;...
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