3 + 

What do you hear Walt Whitman? + 

I hear the workman singing and the farmer’s wife singing, + 

I hear in the distance the sounds of children and of animals early in the day, + 

I hear emulous shouts of Australians pursuing the wild horse, + 

I hear the Spanish dance with castanets in the chestnut shade, to the rebeck and guitar, + 

I hear continual echoes from the Thames, + 

I hear fierce French liberty songs, + 

I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems, + 

I hear the locusts in Syria as they strike the grain and grass with the showers of their terrible clouds, + 

I hear the Coptic refrain toward sundown, pensively falling on the breast of the black venerable vast mother the Nile, + 

I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule, + 

I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque, + 

I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear the responsive base and soprano, + 

I hear the cry of the Cossack, and the sailor’s voice putting to sea at Okotsk, + 

I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle as the slaves march on, as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fasten’d together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains, + 

I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms, + 

I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans, + 

I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful God the Christ, + 

I hear the Hindu teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars, adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three thousand years ago. + 