Page:Leaves of Grass (1860).djvu/127

Can your performance face the open fields and the
sea-side?
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, nobility,
meanness—to appear again in my strength, gait,
face?
Have real employments contributed to it? original
makers—not amanuenses?
Does it meet modern discoveries, calibers, facts, face
to face?
Does it respect me? Democracy? the Soul? to-day?
What does it mean to me? to American persons,
progresses, cities? Chicago, Kanada, Arkansas?
the planter, Yankee, Georgian, native, immigrant,
sailors, squatters, old States, new States?
Does it encompass all The States, and the unexceptional
rights of all the men and women of the
earth, the genital impulse of These States?
Does it see behind the apparent custodians, the
real custodians, standing, menacing, silent, the
mechanics, Manhattanese, western men, southerners,
significant alike in their apathy and in
the promptness of their love?
Does it see what befalls and has always befallen
each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist,
alarmist, infidel, who has ever asked anything
of America?
What mocking and scornful negligence?
The track strewed with the dust of skeletons?
By the roadside others disdainfully tossed?

30.Rhymes and rhymers pass away—poems distilled
from other poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes;