Multitudes by Matt Kane

  
  For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,  
  With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,  
  By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,  
  By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.  
  Fierce-throated beauty!  
  Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps  
      at night,  
  Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,  
      rousing all,  
  Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,  
  (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)  
  Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills returnd,  
  Launchd oer the prairies wide, across the lakes,  
  To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.  
O Magnet-South  
  O magnet-south! O glistening perfumed South! my South!  
  O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all  
      dear to me!  
  O dear to me my birth-things--all moving things and the trees where  
      I was born--the grains, plants, rivers,  
  Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,  
      over flats of slivery sands or through swamps,  
  Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the  
      Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,  
  O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their  
      banks again,  
  Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the  
      Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings  
      or dense forests,  
  I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the  
      blossoming titi;  
  Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast  
      up the Carolinas,  
  I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,  
      the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the  
      graceful palmetto,  
  I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet,  
      and dart my vision inland;  
  O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!  
  The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,  
  The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged  
      with mistletoe and trailing moss,  
  The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in  
      these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the  
      fugitive has his conceald hut;)  
  O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable  
      swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the  
      alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and  
      the whirr of the rattlesnake,  
  The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,  
      singing through the moon-lit night,  
  The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;  
