With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

With husky-haughty lips, O Sea!

Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,

Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,

Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,

Thy ample smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of
the sun,

Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos'd hurricanes,

Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;

Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears—a lack
from all eternity in thy content,

(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make
thee greatest—no less could make thee,)

Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet
never gainst,

Surely some right withheld—some voice, in huge monotonous
rage, of freedom-lover pent,

Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those
breakers,

By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath,

And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,

And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,

And undertones of distant lion roar,

(Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear—but now, rapport
for once,

A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)

The first and last confession of the globe,

Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms,

The tale of cosmic elemental passion,

Thou tellest to a kindred soul.

WALT WHITMAN.