Explore "Manhattan Arming" by Walt Whitman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
1. First, O songs, for a prelude, / Lightly strike on the stretched tympanum, pride and joy in my city, / How she led the rest to arms -- how she gave the cue, / How at once with lithe limbs, unwaiting a moment, she sprang; / O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless! / O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel! / How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent hand; / How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in / their stead; / How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of soldiers,) / How Manhattan drum-taps led.
2. Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading; / Forty years as a pageant -- till unawares, the Lady of this teeming and / turbulent city, / Sleepless, amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth, / With her million children around her -- suddenly, / At dead of night, at news from the South, / Incensed, struck with clenched hand the pavement.