This page has been validated.
Leaves of Grass.
209
2. O Earth!
- O how can the ground of you not sicken?
- How can you be alive, you growths of spring?
- How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
- Are they not continually putting distempered corpses in you?
- Is not every continent worked over and over with sour dead?
3. Where have you disposed of those carcasses of the drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
- Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat ?
- I do not see any of it upon you to-day—or perhaps I am deceived,
- I will run a furrow with my plough—I will press my spade through the sod, and turn it up underneath,
- I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
4. Behold!
- This is the compost of billions of premature corpses,
- Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person—Yet behold!
- The grass covers the prairies,
- The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
- The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
- The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
- The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
- The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
