Poem: “The Father Worketh … and I Work” by Walt Whitman

Ah, little recks the laborer

How near his work is holding him to God,

The loving Laborer through space and time.

 

After all not to create only, or found only,

But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,

To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,

To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,

Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,

To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,

These also are the lessons of our New World;

While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

 

Long and long has the grass been growing,

Long and long has the rain been falling,

Long has the globe been rolling round.