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; 5 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; 10 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, 15 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.)
Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.