Wandering At Morn

Wandering at morn,

 Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,

 Yearning for thee harmonious Union! Thee, singing bird divine! 

Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay, with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee, 

This common marvel I beheld—the parent thrush I watch’d feeding its young. 

 The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,

 Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

 There ponder’d, felt I,

 If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn’d,

 If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,

 Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country; 

Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?

 From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,

 Destin’d to fill the world. 

 --Walt Whitman 

 When Whitman wrote these lines in 1855, those evil times were about to result in the Civil War. There have been many evil days in the history of this republic, but even on the eve of the worst rupture of the United States so far, Whitman could look beyond them to a long future. Now at this celebration of the nation, we face another rupture, and other mortal threats to the Republic (when asked what form of government the founders had settled on, Benjamin Franklin reputedly said—“a republic—if you can keep it.”) 

 The many threats to our democratic Republic and to the resilience of our government, our identity as a nation and its place in the world, as well as the rights and welfare of our people, are accompanied by a salient fact: unless we address our climate and environmental crises successfully, the future is likely to be short, and a dysfunctional America will shorten it further. There may not be time for another resurrection.

Whitman's faith in the American future arguably was fulfilled.  But with that Thrush and its world itself threatened, for us to believe in the possibilities sung in the second stanza requires more faith than Whitman’s.  Yet that future may depend on those who have that faith, or at least urgently act as if they did.