| Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900. |
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| 371. To the Man-of-War-Bird |
| | | By Walt Whitman |
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| THOU who hast slept all night upon the storm, | |
| Walking renewed on thy prodigious pinions, | |
| (Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascendedst, | |
| And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee) | |
| Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating, | 5 |
| As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee, | |
| (Myself a speck, a point on the world’s floating vast.) | |
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| Far, far at sea, | |
| After the night’s fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks, | |
| With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene, | 10 |
| The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun, | |
| The limpid spread of air cerulean, | |
| Thou also re-appearest. | |
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| Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings) | |
| To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, | 15 |
| Thou ship of air that never furl’st thy sails, | |
| Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating, | |
| At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America, | |
| That sport’st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud, | |
| In them, in thy experiences, hadst thou my soul, | 20 |
| What joys! what joys were thine! | |
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