Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, COMRADES AND LOVERS, REST NOT, by NELSON ANTRIM CRAWFORD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

COMRADES AND LOVERS, REST NOT, by                    
First Line: Oh, you genteel, conventional, uncourageous
Last Line: Rest not.
Subject(s): Poetry & Poets; Whitman, Walt (1819-1891)


COMRADES AND LOVERS, REST NOT

Oh, you genteel, conventional, uncourageous,
Bank president, suave, and your anaemic women,
Professional Y. M. C. A. secretaries and directors of boards of welfare,
Holders of doctorates from Leipzig and your conservative, purposeless students,
Village newspaper men, telling as your own what your party central committees
have told you,
Reactionary government officials, pretending to be efficient in the public
service,
Blustering Western politicians, ignorant of history, blunderers in logic,
opponents of free speech, of justice to women, of world service by America,
Impassive women, believing that sex is sinful, unwilling to face proved truth,
taking refuge in ponderous, ridiculous, superstitious platitudes,
And you who paid sixty dollars for a set of Walt Whitman's works and have not
opened it except to paste in your bookplate with its fatuous Latin motto --
All your conventional illiberals, evaders of fact and decision, distrustful of
others, distrustful of yourselves,
You will praise Walt Whitman this month because it is fashionable to observe his
centenary.

It is well: you are better satisfied that you do not know him.
For do you think Walt Whitman the egotist, the unconventional, the liberal, the
sincere, the frank, the healthy, the free, the light-hearted, the heroic,
The glad, the rough, the tender, the democrat, the American, the world-citizen,
the friend of the worker,
Poet of the body, poet of the soul, poet of every dauntless rebel,
Would want to associate with you, or do you think you would want to associate
with him?
What do you care for America, real America, for democracy, and for the name of
America and the name of democracy
In England, France, Jugo-Slavia, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Poland, Brazil,
Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, the Ukraine, Japan, Liberia, China, Italy, New
Zealand?
You would have America secede from the world -- self-cultured, sufficient,
You would make her an old maid, hopeless, childless, pitied or despised,
You would destroy democracy by establishing a peacetime espionage, a censorship
of life and art and opinion.
And this month you will yawp the praises of Whitman,
You who have met Whitman on Broadway, in Camden, in Lawrence, in the mines of
Arizona, and on
the prairies of North Dakota.
Yes, you have met him and have not recognized him;
You have met him and hated and scorned him.

Afoot and light-hearted, Walt Whitman still is traveling the open road,
And the long brown path is still before him.
He sat by the bedsides of dying boys in the hospitals of Europe,
He strode past the White House in Washington as another President looked out and
exclaimed,
"Well, he looks like a man!"
He marched with the Russian hosts that overthrew the Czar in that silent
revolution,
He sat in the assembly room with the striking telephone operators of
Massachusetts,
He paces the quays and the streets of Paris as a new world is a-making.
He sees his vision not wholly realized, but yet on the point of realization:
The Asiatic and the African hand in hand -- the European and American hand in
hand.

And you, carpenters, farmers, deckhands, weavers, printers, bridge builders,
pickers of cotton in the South and harvesters of wheat in the North,
Sheep herders, brakemen, brick masons, telephone operators, shop girls, wheel
tappers, waiters, domestics, workers in mines, mail carriers, whitewings,
laborers skilled and unskilled,
Yes, and you lawyers, doctors, writers, engineers, manufacturers, shop-keepers,
All of you who are fair and honest and seekers after justice for all men,
Walt Whitman will return to lead you on the open road of honesty, frankness,
democracy.
(Most of you never owned a volume of Walt Whitman, but he is your companion and
you are his companions, beloved, inseparable.)
You are his great companions, you are his swift and majestic men, you are his
greatest women.
You and he will travel together the long brown path, the grand road of the
universe,
Seeking only perfect democracy, seeking only the glory of America as she serves
the universe.
Comrades and lovers,
Comrades and lovers,
Comrades and lovers,
Rest not.





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