Years of the Unperformed by Walt Whitman — Read

Years of the unperformed! your horizon rises -- I see it part away for more august dramas; / I see not America only -- I see not only Liberty's nation but other nations embattling; / I see tremendous entrances and exits -- I see new combinations -- I see the solidarity of races; / I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's stage; / Have the old forces played their parts? are the acts suitable to them closed? / I see Freedom, completely armed, and victorious, and very haughty, with Law by her side, both issuing forth against the idea of caste; / -- What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach? / I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions! / I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken; / I see the landmarks of European kings removed; / I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, all others give way; / Never were such sharp questions asked as this day; / Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God.

Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest; / His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere -- he colonises the Pacific, the archipelagoes; / With the steam-ship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war, / With these, and the world-spreading factories, he interlinks all geography, all lands; / -- What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas? / Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe? / Is humanity forming _en masse_? -- for lo! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim; / The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war; / No one knows what will happen next -- such portents fill the days and nights. / Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms; / Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me; / This incredible rush and heat -- this strange ecstatic fever of dreams, O years! / Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake! ) / The performed America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me, / The unperformed, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.