Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.[1]
In the Song of Joys he exclaims:
O something pernicious and dread!
Something far away from a puny and pious life! …
To see men fall and die and not complain!
To taste the savage taste of blood—to be so devilish!
To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.[2]
O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
To meet life as a powerful conqueror.[3]
Piety and conformity to them that like,
Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like.[4]
He would sing “the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth.”[5] He feels all the unrealized greatness of the earth,[6] and to the earth addresses a song which has the solemnity of a Vedic hymn:
O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention.[7]
