Longings for Home by Walt Whitman — Read

O Magnet South! O glistening, perfumed South! my South! / O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! good and evil! O all dear to me! / O dear to me my birth-things -- all moving things, and the trees where I was / born,[1] the grains, plants, rivers; / Dear to me my own slow, sluggish rivers, where they flow distant over flats / of silvery sands or through swamps; / Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the / Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa, and the Sabine -- / O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their banks again. / Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes -- I float on Okeechobee -- I cross / the hummock land, or through pleasant openings or dense forests. / I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree, and the blossoming titi. / Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast up the / Carolinas; / I see where the live-oak is growing -- I see where the yellow-pine, the / scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto. / I pass rude sea-headlands, and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and / dart my vision inland; / O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! / The cactus, guarded with thorns -- the laurel-tree, with large white flowers; / The range afar -- the richness and barrenness -- the old woods charged with / mistletoe and trailing moss.

The piney odour and the gloom -- the awful natural stillness, Here in these / dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave / has his concealed hut; / O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, / infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, / the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of / the rattlesnake; / The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon -- singing / through the moon-lit night, / The humming-bird, the wild-turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; / A Tennessee corn-field -- the tall, graceful, long-leaved corn -- slender, / flapping, bright green, with tassels -- with beautiful ears, each / well-sheathed in its husk; / An Arkansas prairie -- a sleeping lake, or still bayou. / O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs -- I can stand them not -- I will depart! / O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian! / O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never / wander more!