A Broadway Pagent
A Broadway Pageant
O
Courteous, the swart-cheek'd two-sworded envoys,
Leaning
back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive,
Ride to-day through Manhattan.
Libertad! I do
not know whether others behold what I behold,
In the procession along with the nobles of Niphon, the
errand-bearers,
Bringing up the rear, hovering above, around, or in the ranks
marching,
But I will sing you
a song of what I behold Libertad.
When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her
pavements,
When
the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the proud
roar I love,
When the round-mouth'd guns out of the
smoke and smell I
love spit their salutes,
When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me, and heaven
clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin haze,
When gorgeous the countless straight stems, the forests
at
the wharves, thicken with colors,
When every ship richly drest carries her flag at the peak,
When pennants
trail and street-festoons hang from the
windows,
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers
and
foot-standers, when the mass is densest,
When the facades of the houses are alive with people,
when
eyes gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time,
When the guests from the islands advance, when
the pageant
moves forward visible,
When the summons is made, when the answer that waited
thousands
of years answers,
I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge
with the crowd, and gaze
with them.
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Comrade Americanos! to us, then at last the Orient comes.
To us, my city,
Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on
opposite sides, to walk in the space between,
To-day our Antipodes comes.
The Originatress comes,
The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of
eld,
Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with
passion,
Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering eyes,
The race of Brahma comes.
See my cantabile! these and more are flashing to us from the
procession,
As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine it moves changing
before us.
For not the envoys nor the tann'd Japanee from his island
only,
Lithe and silent the Hindoo appears, the Asiatic continent
itself appears, the past, the dead,
The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable,
The envelop'd mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,
The north, the sweltering south, eastern Assyria, the Hebrews,
the ancient of ancients,
Vast desolated cities, the gliding present, all of these and
more are in the pageant-procession.
Geography, the world, is in it,
The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast
beyond,
The coast you henceforth are facing — you, Libertad! from
your Western golden shores,
The countries there with their populations, the millions enmasse
are curiously here,
The swarming market-places, the temples with idols ranged
along the sides or at the end, bonze, brahmin, and llama,
Mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman,
The singing-girl and the dancing-girl, the ecstatic persons,
the secluded emperors,
Confucius himself, the great poets and heroes, the warriors,
the castes, all,
Trooping up, crowding from all directions, from the Altay
mountains,
From Thibet, from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of
China,
From the southern peninsulas and the demi-continental
islands, from Malaysia,
These and whatever belongs to them palpable show forth to
me, and are seiz'd by me,
And I am seiz'd by them, and friendlily held by them,
Till as here them all I chant, Libertad! for themselves and
for you.
For I too raising my voice join the ranks of this pageant,
I am the chanter, I chant aloud over the pageant,
I
chant the world on my Western sea,
I chant copious the islands beyond, thick as stars in the
sky,
I chant
the new empire grander than any before, as in a
vision it comes to me,
I chant America the mistress, I
chant a greater supremacy,
I chant projected a thousand blooming cities yet in time on
those groups of
sea-islands,
My sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archipelagoes,
My stars and stripes fluttering
in the wind,
Commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work,
races reborn, refresh'd,
Lives,
works resumed — the object I know not — but the old,
the Asiatic renew'd as it must be,
Commencing
from this day surrounded by the world.
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