_TO THE STATES._
TO IDENTIFY THE SIXTEENTH, SEVENTEENTH, OR EIGHTEENTH PRESIDENTIAD.[1]
Why reclining, interrogating? Why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight! Scum floating atop of the waters!
Who are they, as bats and night-dogs, askant in the Capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your
Arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? Are those the great Judges? Is that the
President?
Then I will sleep a while yet--for I see that these States sleep, for
reasons.
With gathering murk--with muttering thunder and lambent shoots, we all duly
awake, South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will
surely awake.
[Footnote 1: These were the three Presidentships of Polk; of Taylor,
succeeded by Fillmore; and of Pierce;--1845 to 1857.]
_TEARS._
Tears! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears;
On the white shore dripping, dripping, sucked in by the sand;
Tears--not a star shining--all dark and desolate;
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head:
--O who is that ghost?--that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouched there on the sand?
Streaming tears--sobbing tears--throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering, with swift steps along the beach;
O wild and dismal night-storm, with wind! O belching and desperate!
O shade, so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated
pace;
But away, at night, as you fly, none looking--O then the unloosened ocean
Of tears! tears! tears!
_A SHIP.
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