ARM’D year! year of the struggle! <br />No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year! <br />Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas <br /> piano; <br />But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, <br /> carrying a rifle on your shoulder, <br />With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands–with a knife in <br /> the belt at your side, <br />As I heard you shouting loud–your sonorous voice ringing across the <br /> continent; <br />Your masculine voice, O year, as rising amid the great cities, <br />Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you, as one of the workmen, the <br /> dwellers in Manhattan; <br />Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and <br /> Indiana, <br />Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait, and descending the <br /> Alleghanies; <br />Or down from the great lakes, or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along <br /> the Ohio river; <br />Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at <br /> Chattanooga on the mountain top, <br />Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs, clothed in blue, bearing <br /> weapons, robust year; <br />Heard your determin’d voice, launch’d forth again and again; <br />Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp’d cannon, <br />I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.<br /><br />Walt Whitman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/1861/
