Give Me The Silent, Splendid Sun

Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling; 

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard; 

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows; 

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape; 

Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;         

Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars; 

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers, where I can walk undisturb’d; 

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman, of whom I should never tire; 

Give me a perfect child—give me, away, aside from the noise of the world, a rural, domestic life; 

Give me to warble spontaneous songs, reliev’d, recluse by myself, for my own ears only;  

Give me solitude—give me Nature—give me again, O Nature, your primal sanities! 

—These, demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and rack’d by the war-strife;) 

These to procure, incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart, 

While yet incessantly asking, still I adhere to my city; 

Day upon day, and year upon year, O city, walking your streets,  

Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time, refusing to give me up; 

Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul—you give me forever faces; 

(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries; 

I see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for.)

~~~ first stanza, Give Me The Silent, Splendid Sun by Walt Whitman