Walt Whitman’s “Election Day, November, 1884”
posted by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner
If I should need to name, O Western World!
your powerfulest scene to-day,
‘Twould not be you, Niagara – nor you, ye
limitless prairies — nor your huge
rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemitie, with all your spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, ap-
pearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones – nor Huron’s belt
of mighty lakes — nor Mississippie’s stream:
This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now,
I’d name — the still small voice preparing —
America’s choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen — the act
itself the main, the quadrennial
choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d –
seaboard and inland — Texas to Maine,
The Prairie States – Vermont, Virginia, Cali-
fornia ,
The final ballot-shower from East to West –
the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling — (a sword-
less conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old,
or modern Napoleon’s:)
Or good or ill humanity — welcoming the
darker odds, the dross, the scene’s debris:
–Foams and ferments the wine? It serves to
purify — while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft previous
ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s
sails.
(The is an original draft; for the final version Whitman published, click here).
