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Walt Whitman: Poems

Leaves of Grass: 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.

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